Private Arrangements Research Articles

Does organized crime exist in Africa?: Figure 1

There is increasing international concern about the growth of organized crime in Africa. Important criminal organizations and professional criminals are present in Africa, but we argue that the term “organized crime” is not a very useful description of their activity, since what we are actually witnessing is a reformulation of politics and crime into networks that transcend the state/non-state boundary in ways that are hardly subsumed in standard concepts of organized crime. Similar processes are taking place in various parts of the world, and thus African countries are not exceptional in this regard. The process, however, does take particular forms in Africa that arise out of the histories of individual countries. The article describes the evolution in countries as diverse as Libya, Guinea-Bissau, and Zimbabwe of a market for protection, as business people – legitimate and otherwise – seek protection for their activities and their personnel. This market for protection is created by making private arrangements, often with state officials working in private capacities. The implications are profound: they could amount to a new mode of governance connecting Africa to international markets and institutions in which the distinctions between licit and illicit economic activity become difficult to detect.

The Privatization of Water Services: The Quest for Enhanced Human Rights Accountability

Water has been regarded as the last frontier of privatization across the world. Most privatization arrangements do not involve any transfer of state assets to the private sector. Rather, the arrangements focus on the transfer of operational and managerial functions to the private sector. Several human rights concerns arise in any water privatization initiative. The fundamental question that arises is whether this transfer of functional responsibility gives rise to corresponding human rights duties on such nonstate actors and, if so, what the precise nature of these duties is. This article discusses the potential of voluntary initiatives for holding corporations responsible for the right to water in privatized contexts. It argues that although these voluntary initiatives contain flexible norms and procedures, from a legal pluralist perspective, these norms may be seen as law for participating firms. Such voluntary norms constitute an important development in a bid to hold corporations accountable for the right to water in the absence of binding international law norms on corporations.

Access to medicines and the safety of the people.

In this paper I will attempt to outline what I believe to be the most persuasive and acceptable (although not necessarily as yet accepted) theoretical justifications for the widest possible access to medicines and for prioritising measures to increase this access. This paper sets out the compelling arguments for state responsibility for these matters independently of any private or commercial arrangements that may be in place.

Infrastructure's Stubborn Spatiality and its Maturing Financialisation

The paper reports on an Australia Research Council funded project which examines the ways private infrastructure finance is structured within infrastructure deals. This paper draws on a series of interviews with investors and service providers in North America, the UK and Australia. It charts the development of private infrastructure financing post-GFC and examines the ways organisational, capital and regulatory structures have evolved and been transformed. The argument uses a Chamberlinian monopolistic approach to the rise of the infrastructure financing market and argues the proposition that the sector has now arrived at a relatively mature market structure position. That said, the article reveals that the sector’s regulatory regime remains heavily informalised with its nature and direction determined largely by private and non-disclosed arrangements.

Containing Corporatism: EU Competition Law and Private Interest Government

Corporatism, or private interest government, raises objections both from a democratic and from an economic perspective. This paper examines the application of EU competition law to private rule making that is purportedly in the public interest. Earlier case law holding Member States responsible for anticompetitive delegation (Van Eycke) can be contrasted with case law that focuses on the inherent restrictions of the pursuit of public policy aims and keeps some private arrangements outside the scope of the cartel prohibition altogether (Wouters). More recently we can identify an approach where the public and private activities of entities are considered separately (SELEX). The 2014 ONP Case is an example where the General Court distinguishes private and public interests, and takes a tough line where the limits of the latter are exceeded. Corporatism is therefore, to some extent, contained by EU competition law. However, there is a related trend toward taking account of public interest requirements in antitrust under the directly applicable exemption provision of Article 101(3) TFEU. Alongside the abovementioned Wouters approach that requires balancing under Article 101(1) TFEU, and given the context of the decentralisation of EU antitrust law, this raises a risk of fragmentation that remains to be addressed.

Bank Rescue Schemes in Continental Europe: The Power of Collective Inaction

Comparing bank rescue schemes in France and Germany during the banking crisis of 2008–9, this article argues that collective inaction is a little-studied aspect in the exercise of power in business–government relations. Contrary to studies that focus on lobbying, structural power or the influence of beliefs, the comparison highlights that governments depend on contributions from the financial industry during crisis management. In the negotiations to design bank support schemes, some countries, such as France, succeeded in engaging their financial sector collectively. Such public–private burden-sharing arrangements alleviate the public budget and increase mutual surveillance between banks during government support. In other countries, such as Germany, a collectively organized industry response failed, which forced the government to design an entirely public support scheme. The German government reacted to this perceived imbalance by imposing tighter banking regulation to avoid a repetition of the impotence it experienced in 2008.

Public‐private wage gaps and skill levels: evidence from French, British and Italian micro data

PurposeThe authors aim to investigate public‐private pay determination using French, British and Italian micro data from the 2001 ECHP (European Community Household Panel) and estimate public/private wage differentials by country. By focussing on different countries, they exploit institutional differences to gain insights on the process of pay formation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use regression techniques to compute the pay premium both at the average and at different education/skill levels. They then decompose the observed differences into a part due to characteristics and another part due to different returns between sectors, also at different quantiles of the wage distributions within skills.FindingsEven after controlling for observable characteristics, the authors find an overall positive wage differential for public sector workers in each of the three countries. As expected, the differential varies by skill. In general, the present findings do not fully support the view that the public (private) sector pays more (less) among the low skilled than the private (public) sector, and that the opposite is true for the highly skilled. The authors also document that the public pay premium varies as one moves up or down in the skill distribution.Practical implicationsOn the one hand, the authors’ results confirm that the public sector acts in general as a “fair employer”, compressing pay dispersion with respect to the private sector. On the other hand, the interactions of public and private labour market institutional arrangements play a crucial role in shaping the structure of relative wages across sectors. For example, when the monopsony power in wage bargaining is relevant in both sectors as, for example, in Britain, the private sector pays in absolute value proportionally less, and also the public wage premium is smaller.Originality/valueThis is the first attempt to use comparable data for three countries to analyse public/private wage differences by skill levels and to link the evidence with differences in public/private wage setting regimes.

Principles and Structures of European Risk Governance, or: How (not) to Play a Trust Game

Ever more risky service activities are carried out across borders, creating spillovers and externalities. At the same time, if freedom to provide services is legally enabled, states can cooperate in multiple ways to mitigate the potential risks accruing from crossborder activities. Global Administrative Law Scholarship distinguishes five types of administrative regulation: “administration by formal international organizations; administrations based on collective action by transnational networks of governmental officials; distributed administration conducted by national regulators under treaty regimes, mutual recognition arrangements or cooperative standards; administration by hybrid intergovernmental–private arrangements; and administration by private institutions with regulatory functions. In practice many of these layers overlap or combine […]”. In the area of risky cross–border service provision, the EU has moved from a more decentralised version of networks and mutual recognition characterised by coordination and minimum harmonization of rules and standards to a more centralized commandand–control system with European authorities and supervision.

Why Market Failures Are Not a Problem: James Buchanan on Market Imperfections, Voluntary Cooperation, and Externalities

This article describes the intellectual trajectory James Buchanan followed from the early 1950s, when he started to work on ``spillover effects,'' to the mid-1960s, when he had completed a consistent explanation of the efficiency of market mechanisms and private arrangements in the presence of externalities. We show that, in contrast with what most economists admit, Buchanan argued that, even if externalities are a cause of ``market failures,'' this cannot be used to legitimate the intervention of the state, because individuals tend to pay for the external effects their actions generate. By adopting a historical perspective, we are able to show the remarkable consistency of Buchanan's claims about externalities, even though he developed them in a period when the views of economists on the question were changing dramatically.

Observations on the legal theory of finance

This is a comment on ’Towards a legal theory of finance’ by Katharina Pistor. It notes that both law and money are complex and controversial phenomena. They have to be treated as historically specific institutions that arise in the context of fundamental uncertainty. The historical origins of both are briefly considered. It is argued that fundamental uncertainty in the Knight-Keynes sense has been marginalised in modern economics and this creates problems for the theory of money. The comment also expands on the notion of ’essential hybridity’ - which signals that money and law are a result of both private arrangements and state intervention.

Incentive Compensation and ESO Expensing Under SFAS No. 123 and 123(R)

In December 2004, FASB issued a revised SFAS No. 123, Share-Based Payment, and required public companies to expense employee stock options (ESOs). Top executives at major corporations strongly opposed ESO expensing, citing many conceptual and implementation issues. They argue, for example, ESOs are a private arrangement between employees and shareholders and the related expense does not constitute an expense to the firm. They also argue the models that FASB recommends to calculate the fair values of ESOs, such as Black and Scholes and binomial models, are unsuitable for ESOs. This study finds that annual CEO cash compensation is negatively associated with ESO expense in the period 1996-2005, the only period for which ESO expense was publicly available for many firms and also a period in which ESO expense was disclosed but not recognized. If disclosed ESO expense affects CEO compensation, recognized ESO expense is likely to not only do so but do so to a greater extent. Our result therefore provides an alternative explanation for why firms oppose fair value ESO expensing. The result also makes it less likely that managers opposed fair value ESO expensing primarily because of conceptual and measurement issues, notwithstanding their public statements to the contrary.

Alternative Service Delivery Arrangements in Local Municipalities in Israel: A Case Study

The adoption of alternative service delivery arrangements (ASDAs) is not a new phenomenon in Israeli local government. The current study is based on empirical quantitative research which examined the effect of economic and political factors on the scope of privatization and alternative service delivery arrangements (ASDAs) in local municipalities in Israel. The “economic constraint” model and the “political choice” model served as the theoretical framework for examining considerations underlying service privatization. The contribution of the current study to previous literature on ASDAs is in examining the effect of moderator variables on the scope of privatization (SOP). A study of 29 services in 106 local mu- nicipalities in Israel indicated that political factors have a dominant effect on the scope of privatization in local municipalities while the effect of economic factors is small and statistically insignificant. The following variables were found to have a statistically significant effect on the scope of privatization: number of employees, age of local municipality, employee costs and characteristics of the head of the local municipality.

The Two German Labour Market Miracles: Blueprints for Tackling the Unemployment Crisis?

The article reviews the factors underlying Germany's exceptional labour market performance since 2005. It attributes labour market turnaround to powerful social reforms strengthening labour supply and effectiveness of public employment services, assisted by cooperative social partners moderating wage growth. In the great recession, ongoing transition to low-unemployment equilibrium, peculiarities in the export cycle, and private arrangements supporting labour hoarding, rather than discrete policy changes, kept employment at unpredicted levels. While these features scarcely transfer to other circumstances, the policies that evidently lifted Germany to lasting higher employment levels may provide valuable blueprints for countries struggling with current structural unemployment crises.

External Supervision in Social Work: Power, Space, Risk, and the Search for Safety

Over the past few decades there has been a trend to separate “clinical” or “professional” supervision of social workers from “line” supervision provided in social services. Professional or clinical supervision is often sourced externally through a private arrangement or contracted out by agencies to individual practitioners of supervision. A number of factors underpin the development of this external supervision including: the perceived imposition of managerial agendas on supervision; the problem of power dynamics within organisations; and a growing “risk” conceptualisation of practitioners’ wellbeing. A potential negative impact of this separation of supervision from the “field” of practice is that it privatises supervision in a manner that in itself poses risks. This exploratory paper examines the impact of discourses of risk and safety, space and place within social work supervision and draws links between these aspects. Some material drawn from a small qualitative study of the experiences of six expert supervisors in New Zealand illuminates these themes. A significant finding was that the dominance of compliance and surveillance activities within the public sector was linked to the pursuit of external supervision and that four dominant forms of supervision can be discerned in the current discourse.

Does Equity Market Stifle Private Credit Market?

Why do countries differ so much in terms of their financial systems? Are banks and equity competing or complementary sources of financing for firms? To address these questions, I study various determinants of capital market development and whether these determinants favor one form of capital (equity capital) over the other (private bank credit) during the process of financial development. I find that capital market development is primarily demand driven. The demand for finance affects the equity market development disproportionately more (in a non-linear way) than it does the private bank credit market. Furthermore, the relative strength of enforcement of creditors' and minority shareholders' rights also significantly determines whether external financing is predominantly raised through private arrangement of credit or through the public equity market. Through the power of demand and enforcement, we can explain the prominence of the market-based financial system in recent years. I find that the signs and significance of various political and legal endowments in affecting financial development crucially depend on the conditioning information set of the regression, and thus may not be very informative in understanding the co-development of various segments of the capital market. Despite the prominence of the market-based system in recent years, I show that no financial system is inherently superior to the other, rather differences in the underlying determinants of capital market development shape which form of capital is going to be the dominant one in a financial system.

“I didn’t even know what I was looking for”: A qualitative study of the decision-making processes of Canadian medical tourists

BackgroundMedical tourism describes the private purchase and arrangement of medical care by patients across international borders. Increasing numbers of medical facilities in countries around the world are marketing their services to a receptive audience of international patients, a phenomenon that has largely been made possible by the growth of the Internet. The growth of the medical tourism industry has raised numerous concerns around patient safety and global health equity. In spite of these concerns, there is a lack of empirical research amongst medical tourism stakeholders. One such gap is a lack of engagement with medical tourists themselves, where there is currently little known about how medical tourists decide to access care abroad. We address this gap through examining aspects of Canadian medical tourists’ decision-making processes.MethodsSemi-structured phone interviews were administered to 32 Canadians who had gone abroad as medical tourists. Interviews touched on motivations, assessment of risks, information seeking processes, and experiences at home and abroad. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts followed.ResultsThree overarching themes emerged from the interviews: (1) information sources consulted; (2) motivations, considerations, and timing; and (3) personal and professional supports drawn upon. Patient testimonials and word of mouth connections amongst former medical tourists were accessed and relied upon more readily than the advice of family physicians. Neutral, third-party information sources were limited, which resulted in participants also relying on medical tourism facilitators and industry websites.ConclusionsWhile Canadian medical tourists are often thought to be motivated by wait times for surgery, cost and availability of procedures were common primary and secondary motivations for participants, demonstrating that motivations are layered and dynamic. The findings of this analysis offer a number of important factors that should be considered in the development of informational interventions targeting medical tourists. It is likely that trends observed amongst Canadian medical tourists apply to those from other nations due to the key role the transnational medium of the Internet plays in facilitating patients’ private international medical travel.

The Right to Remain Anonymous: Anonymous Speakers, Confidential Sources and the Public Good

In the digital age, the news media gives voice to anonymous speakers in two ways: reporters may extend confidentiality to sources in exchange for newsworthy information, or a news website may host an online comment function that allows readers to post their reactions to content pseudonymously. Of these two groups of anonymous speakers, only online posters enjoy certain First Amendment protection against a subpoena seeking disclosure of their identities. The reporter’s privilege has always been legally defined as the professional privilege of a reporter to maintain the confidentiality of his sources. Yet as with all evidentiary privileges, the reporter’s privilege serves both private and public ends. Historically, state statutes and state common law have protected the private arrangement that enables sources to disclose information without fear of reprisal, and journalists to gain newsworthy content, because this relationship furthers the free flow of information to the public. By contrast, protection for anonymous

Eco-City Governance: A Case Study of Treasure Island and Sonoma Mountain Village

In recent years, there have been several dozen major ‘eco-city’ initiatives underway worldwide, primarily in response to global climate change and growing urbanization. Among these, two have been in the making since the early 2000s in California, USA, from where the eco-city movement originated over 20 years ago: Treasure Island, in San Francisco, and Sonoma Mountain Village, in Rohnert Park (Sonoma County). This article analyses these urban sustainability initiatives in terms of the emerging hybrid governance relations and interactions and how these inform the planning, co-ordination and implementation of the initiatives. Among the key governance aspects discussed are the partial privatization through elaborate public–private arrangements, the role of international partners in shaping the urban sustainability agenda and the project-based approach used to effect the initiatives. The findings suggest a prevailing mode of ‘governance at a distance’ and related innovation in governance mechanisms, which, in turn, impacts on how urban sustainability is conceptualized and put into practice.

Participation in sport: international policy perspectives

Nicholson, M., Hoye, R. & Houlihan B. (Eds.). (2011). Participation in Sport. International Policy Perspectives. London: Routledge.Sport participation has become one of the key determinants in describing, explaining and understanding the characteristics of contemporary leisure - and sometimes even more broadly, postmodern global societies in general. The benefits of sport participation are widely recognised in most parts of the world. Involvement in physical activity is believed to function as one of the major preventers of global health problems. Sport participation is also seen as a valuable source of social capital that contributes to the community spirit and equality among members of contemporary societies. Moreover, sport participation is interconnected with recreational physical culture and the leisure industry by creating various forms of business activities and hence promoting economic growth and wellbeing.Participation in Sport. International policy Perspectives addresses these issues by providing an overview of sport participation from as many as sixteen countries around the world. The featured countries consist of seven European nations (England, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland) together with South Africa, four Asian countries (India, China, Singapore and Japan); Australia and New Zealand, and finally the North American perspectives from the United States and Canada. The ambitious aim of the book is that through observations of national structures of sport, national sporting cultures, participation levels in organised sport, the nature and extent of government interventions and implementation and the impact of government policies to describe and understand international differences in sport participation.It is not surprising that with so many countries in focus, one of the main conclusions is that there is great diversity in national sport structures around the world. What seems to be common to all countries, however is that sports delivery systems involve a trinity of public, private and volunteer sector arrangements. Depending on the political, economic and social systems, government involvement is either centralised (with the state more strictly in control of the sport participation agenda) or decentralised (as it is the case for example in the US where sport participation is largely built upon school sport). Diversity in sport structures also results from the varying role of National Olympic Committees' involvement in aligning sport policies, or as it is the case with company sport in Japan, of other models and national sport delivery arrangements.What seems to be evident, however is, that in most countries sport participation is delivered and consumed through a federalist community club system. With the influence of national subsidy and funding programmes volunteer-run sport clubs provide preconditions and activities for participation. In many featured countries this model has its roots in the historically strong amateur based sporting culture and a tradition of community based civic activities. However, the idea of sport participation being merely a third sector activity started to change, and more especially during the 1980 's and 1990's when a substantial growth in the number of commercial providers (such as gyms and fitness centres) occurred. In fact, in many of the developed countries, the number of participants in sport participation in private facilities has been equal or exceeded the number of participants in non-profit providers. What is a striking finding in the book, however, is that the type of sport structure does not seem to correlate with the frequency nor intensity of sport participation within each distinctive nations.As it is the case with the sport structures also national sporting cultures vary in the featured countries. In some parts of the world (for instance in North- Western Europe) sport participation and physical activity seem to have become normative forms of action and behaviour that self-regulate people's leisure orientations. …

Professional indemnity and its importance: a legal overview

The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of professional indemnity to protect an individual's healthcare practice. Healthcare professionals should ensure that they have appropriate indemnity to cover all their professional activities. This may be arranged through their employer, professional organisation or by private arrangement, or a combination of these methods. The various types and forms of indemnity are discussed.