Equal Ownership Research Articles

Enforcement and performance: The role of ownership, legalism and trust in international joint ventures

This study integrates international joint venture (IJV) literature on ownership, trust, and legalism and examines their effects as enforcement mechanisms on IJV satisfaction. The hypotheses are tested across three samples of managers – Chinese, Western, and Asian – in China-based IJVs. Results showed that relationship among ownership, trust, legalism, and IJV performance varies across cultures. Specifically, equal ownership is positively associated with IJV satisfaction for Chinese partners but majority equity leads to less IJV satisfaction for Asian IJV partners. Trust is found to be positively associated with IJV satisfaction across all three samples. However, only for Western partners, legalism has a significant impact on satisfaction and moderates the effect of trust. Conceptual contributions, managerial implications, and limitations are discussed based on these results.

Homelessness, human rights, litigation and law reform: a view from Canada

At the international level, Canada has in the past played an important role as an advocate for the recognition of access to adequate housing as a fundamental human right. Canada ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1976 and played a leading role in promoting the adoption and ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, both of which contain explicit recognition of the right to adequate housing. In 2000 and 2001, Canada co-sponsored the resolution entitled Women’s Equal Ownership of, Access to and Control over Land and the Equal Rights to Own Property and to Adequate Housing, subsequently approved by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 2001). Canada has generally resisted US opposition to recognition of the right to adequate housing in international fora (Hulchanski 1996).

The Social-Spatial Organization of Forest-Lands and the Subjective Classification of its Lands in a Shifting Cultivation Village

The aim of this paper is to clarify the subjective classification of lands in a shifting cultivation village, relating to the social framework of forest-land ownership and the spatial formation of forest-land use. For this purpose, the author attempted to describe the villager's knowledge of the forest-lands in a mountain village.The author chose a mountain village, Onaru in Omogo-mura, Ehime Prefecture, as a case study. Onaru is a remote village in the Shikoku Mountains, and the settlement is located on slopes at about 850m above the sea.In Onaru, equal ownership of forest-lands by the villagers gradually collapsed after about 1900. There then arose a difference in the scale of holdings of forest-lands, and the lands owned by each of the villagers became scattered. Most of the forest-lands were privately owned, covered by lots for shifting cultivation and fallow. However, the outer zone of the territory in Onaru was common land and covered by natural forests. The villagers engaged in shifting cultivation on their own or rented fields, before the rapid depopulation in the 1960's. They rotated crops of corn, wheat, potatoes and so on, for staple foods, and mitsumata (materials for paper), for selling.In order to elucidate the villagers' recognition of their lands, the author examined their knowledge of the lands, showing 117 Koaza (small place names) of Onaru. Koaza were written in the land register book made in the 1880's, and there were many suffixes signifying landforms and plants. The results can be summarized as follows:It was found that the villagers classify their lands based on conditions such as slope, altitude, sunshine, wind and soil. For example, they distinguished between hiura (slope in the sun) and kageyama (slope out of the sun), ma-tsuchi (soil adapted to mitsumata) and onji-tsuchi (soil adapted to potatoes).The knowledge held by each villager was not only rich, but also homogeneous. The reason for this can be thought of as follows: Knowledge was important for both landowners and tenant farmers to select land for cultivation. In addition, it can be indicated that swidden lands were widely scattered in the territory of Onaru, and the villagers jointly burned the thickets to shift each others' location.The subjectfve classification of lands in Onaru was based on the villagers' indigenous knowledge. It was obtained through the management of shifting cultivation, which used forest-lands adapted to the local environment.

Structuring the Joint Venture: Direct Foreign Investment in the United States

Discusses the problems involved when foreign investors decide to try and involve themselves in the US market. US and local income taxes are involved and investors must be apprised of this and the need to sign the appropriate agreements, models of which are enclosed herein. Looks at organization and purpose, minority protection and equal ownership. Concludes that very careful legal planning is required for a successful business relationship.

From Here to There; or, If Cooperative Ownership Is So Desirable, Why are There So Few Cooperatives?

In this paper I want to discuss a well-known but poorly understood problem: how can socialists reconcile the observed paucity of cooperatives in capitalist societies with their alleged superiority on normative grounds? If cooperatives are so desirable, why don't workers desire them? If one's ideal of socialism is central planning, it is clear enough that it cannot emerge gradually within the womb of the capitalist economy. If instead it is something like market socialism, it is not clear that a discontinuous transformation of society is required. If workers want (market) socialism, they can start up here and now. If they don't, doesn't it prove that they do not want it?I shall proceed as follows. Section I argues that the usual explanation - that cooperatives are not economically viable or that workers prefer working in capitalist firms – is not necessarily correct. The explanation may lie elsewhere, in endogenous preference formation, adverse selection, discrimination, or externalities.Section II is concerned with the variety of cooperative arrangements. Only rarely do we find cooperatives in their pure form, with all workers and only workers having equal ownership rights. Non-working owners, non-owning workers and unequal distribution of shares are frequent. When the deviations become sufficiently large, the firms cease to become cooperatives in any meaningful sense.Section III extends the argument of Section I by surveying the causes of cooperative failure. Some fail by success: profitable cooperatives often attract or turn into private ownership. Others fail outright, partly because they tend to be established under unfavorable circumstances and partly because of intrinsic difficulties of management.

Equal Marital Property Rights

Although the Family Law Act recognizes the contribution of a marriage partner as homemaker and parent, in practice, such contributions are often not recognized as equal to those made by paid workers when property is divided on divorce. Because a woman's earning capacity is usually diminished by her family responsibilities, the existing discretionary approach to property division reinforces women's dependency on men. Under a system of equal marital property rights, the equal value of contributions of unpaid spouses would be clearly established. Assets accumulated before marriage would usually be excluded from the equal ownership rule (and hence from distribution to the other party on divorce), both partners would be informed of transactions during marriage, and parties who choose to could contract out of the equal rights scheme. Men and women would know from the outset of marriage what their rights were.