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"Over the last decade, many of the world's biggest companies have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues, or sanction violations, ending either in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines that have surpassed the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalisation, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome change, showing that multinational companies are not above the law. In this book, Cornelia Woll considers how far this turn toward negotiated corporate justice, and the United States' legal action against multinationals in particular, is motivated by geopolitical and geoeconomic concerns. Woll analyses the evolution of corporate criminal prosecutions in the United States, as well as the extraterritorial expansion of its jurisdictions, and demonstrates a notable bias against foreign firms. In extreme cases, she argues, this type of legal action is used for explicitly strategic purposes to further US economic interests at home and abroad, a practice known as 'economic lawfare'. By studying the recent institutional and legal changes within a range of countries that have seen their multinational companies targeted by the threat of US prosecutions - including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Brazil - Woll draws attention to the impact of this strategy in reshaping both national legal approaches to corporate criminal law and the protocols for business government relations. No government wishes to stand accused of allowing their own multinationals to get away with illegal or unethical practices that have only come to light via US investigations, nor do they wish to see the resulting fines from any legal proceedings paid out to the US justice system alone. Woll discusses the resulting measures taken, and those still needed, to strengthen national capacity to intervene in corporate misconduct cases, and considers the extent to which certain US actions exemplify the weaponisation of interdependence by a hegemonic power."--

The geopolitics of American law enforcement and how it changed corporate criminal accountability in other countriesOver the past decade, many of the world's biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, tax evasion, or sanction violations. Corporations including Volkswagen, BP, and Credit Suisse have paid record-breaking fines. Many critics of globalization and corporate impunity cheer this turn toward accountability. Others, however, question American dominance in legal battles that seem to impose domestic legal norms beyond national boundaries. In this book, Cornelia Woll examines the politics of American corporate criminal law's extraterritorial reach. As governments abroad seek to respond to US law enforcement actions against their companies, they turn to flexible legal instruments that allow prosecutors to settle a case rather than bring it to court. With her analysis of the international and domestic politics of law enforcement targeting big business, Woll traces the rise of what she calls "negotiated corporate justice" in global markets.Woll charts the path to this shift through case studies of geopolitical tensions and accusations of "economic lawfare," pitting the United States against the European Union, China, and Japan. She then examines the reactions to the new legal landscape, describing institutional changes in the common law countries of the United Kingdom and Canada and the civil law countries of France, Brazil, and Germany. Through an insightful interdisciplinary analysis of how the prosecution of corporate crime has evolved in the twenty-first century, Woll demonstrates the profound transformation of the relationship between states and private actors in world markets, showing that law is part of economic statecraft in the connected global economy

Cover -- FIRM INTERESTS -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Free-Marketeers despite Themselves? -- 2 Business Interests in Political Economy -- 3 When Trade Turns into Regulatory Reform -- 4 Basic Telecommunication Services -- 5 International Air Transport -- 6 Who Captures Whom? -- 7 Business Influence and Democratic Decision-Making -- Appendix: Interviews Conducted -- Bibliography -- Index

"Bank bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession brought into sharp relief the power that the global financial sector holds over national politics, and provoked widespread public outrage. In The Power of Inaction, Cornelia Woll details the varying relationships between financial institutions and national governments by comparing national bank rescue schemes in the United States and Europe. Woll starts with a broad overview of bank bailouts in more than twenty countries. Using extensive interviews conducted with bankers, lawmakers, and other key players, she then examines three pairs of countries where similar outcomes might be expected: the United States and United Kingdom, France and Germany, Ireland and Denmark. She finds, however, substantial variation within these pairs. In some cases the financial sector is intimately involved in the design of bailout packages; elsewhere it chooses to remain at arm's length. Such differences are often ascribed to one of two conditions: either the state is strong and can impose terms, or the state is weak and corrupted by industry lobbying. Woll presents a third option, where the inaction of the financial sector critically shapes the design of bailout packages in favor of the industry. She demonstrates that financial institutions were most powerful in those settings where they could avoid a joint response and force national policymakers to deal with banks on a piecemeal basis. The power to remain collectively inactive, she argues, has had important consequences for bailout arrangements and ultimately affected how the public and private sectors have shared the cost burden of these massive policy decisions"--

What role do firms play in the making of EU trade policy? This article surveys the policy domain and lays out the instruments firms can employ to influence decisions on trade. It underlines that European trade policy is characterized by a high degree of institutional complexity, which firms have to manage in order to be successful. In particular, the European Commission works intensively to solicit business input in order to gain bargaining leverage vis-à-vis third countries and the EU member states. This reverse lobbying creates a two-channel logic of trade policy lobbying in the EU. Corporate actors have a very good chance of working closely with the European Commission if they can propose pan-European trade policy solutions. This can be either trade liberalization or EU-wide regulatory restrictions on trade. Demands for traditional protectionist measures, especially those that reveal national interest divergences, are difficult to defend at the supranational level. Protectionist lobbying therefore goes through the national route, with corporate actors working to block liberalization by affecting the consensus in the Council of Ministers. The chapter illustrates this two-channel logic by studying busines-government interactions in agricultural trade, textiles and clothing, financial services, and telecommunication services.

The national association of French employers and industry, MEDEF, seems to be an example of strong and unified interest organization, especially since its reform in 1998. Through a study of the collective action of firms in France, this article sheds doubt on such an impression. In fact, a central employers' and industry association only constituted itself in France in response to state and trade union activism and struggled throughout history once these external threats lost importance. Like all encompassing business associations, MEDEF comprises a great variety of groups of business actors and constantly has to manage its internal interest heterogeneity. An analysis of the historical and institutional context of its latest reform demonstrates that the recent media campaign should not be understood as a display of actual strength and coherence; rather it is the last resort of collective action that MEDEF can claim legitimately as its responsibility.

Lobbying by economic actors constitutes a central element of a large part of the literature on trade policy-making. However, it is mainly considered as inputʺ into the political system, which then aggregates the demand of different societal interests. As such inputs, the preferences of economic actors are often simply deduced from economic theory. This paper raises doubts about the usefulness of this analytical parsimony and tries to distinguish more clearly between stable interests, preferences and strategic choices. In particular, it suggests a model that clarifies how abstract interests are translated into concrete policy choices. By examining the lobbying carried out by service providers in the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) in telecommunications and air transport, it then shows that the deduction of trade policy preferences from economic theory does not account well for the general support of multilateral trade liberalization by EU service providers. In particular, changes in identity, causal beliefs and strategic environments in the US and the EU create a variety of lobbying choices that goes beyond the material incentives of trade liberalization. By studying the learning process and the constraints on lobbying imposed by political institutions, the paper suggests that even the political preferences of strong economic actors are sometimes more appropriately dealt with as endogenous to the trade policy process.

International audience ; Regard sur l'évolution de l'économie politique dans l'espace francophone », in Julien Bokilo, Economie politique en science politique : penser le fait politique comme fait économique, Paris, Connaissances et Savoirs, 2021, pp. 5-6. L'économie politique a un statut ambigu dans la littérature francophone. D'un côté il existe des perspectives riches et structurantes sur l'économie comme objet historique, social et donc politique, à commencer par le colbertisme et les physiocrates. Plus récemment Fernand Braudel et l'école des annales ont marqué durablement l'historiographie de l'économie qui se poursuit dans l'histoire globale d'aujourd'hui. Les économistes hétérodoxes et en particulier la théorie de la régulation et l'école de la convention façonnent notre compréhension de l'économie comme fait social, comme ordre fragile et cyclique et comme régime de coordination qui varie selon les pays et dans le temps. Cette richesse se traduit par une grande sensibilité à la sociologie économique et à l'historicité des ordres économiques, avec d'importants travaux produits depuis plusieurs décennies.

Tax cooperation seems to be more difficult to achieve through multilateralism than any other economic issue, despite growing consensus about the detrimental effects of corporate tax competition for both market integration and economic inequalities. Repeated attempts to harmonize corporate taxation have gained momentum since the financial crisis, with important proposals made by the OECD and the European Union. Yet failure to implement or even reach agreement on these proposals shows the need for leadership of the G7 in order to address the concerns of those countries that stand to lose most from corporate tax harmonization.

Tax cooperation seems to be more difficult to achieve through multilateralism than any other economic issue, despite growing consensus about the detrimental effects of corporate tax competition for both market integration and economic inequalities. Repeated attempts to harmonize corporate taxation have gained momentum since the financial crisis, with important proposals made by the OECD and the European Union. Yet failure to implement or even reach agreement on these proposals shows the need for leadership of the G7 in order to address the concerns of those countries that stand to lose most from corporate tax harmonization.

In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences.