Transnational Business Activities Research Articles

Evaluation of Containerized Trade and Competitiveness among Container Ports in Black Sea Basin

With the increase in trading volume and competitiveness in global trade, ports have becomeindispensable and critical rivalry zones for countries. As competitiveness among the firm increaseat a global level, ports become a rivalry zone cause of being the most critical economic structuresand increasing competitiveness for transnational business and trade activities. The Black SeaBasin is one of the most important waterways in the world in terms of commercial, political andstrategic aspects. The devastating consequences of conflicts and tensions, especially in recentyears, prove the importance of the Black Sea Basin for world maritime trade. Therefore, the portsof the Black Sea Basin are of great importance. When the existing literature is reviewed, it is seenthat there are many studies on the competitiveness and efficiency issues. Since the studies in theliterature are mostly conceptual, it is obvious that they do not reveal analytical results, whichconstitutes a deficiency in the literature. In addition, the lack of a scientific study on theefficiency of container ports in the Black Sea Basin in recent years has made this study necessary.The aim of this study is to examine the efficiency and competitiveness of container ports in theBlack Sea Basin, which has a great importance both regionally and globally. The “DataEnvelopment Analysis” (DEA) of the input-oriented CCR model, which is a linear program, wasused to measure the productivity of the ports, and the relative efficiency of the ports wascalculated.

Public Demand for Extraterritorial Environmental and Social Public Goods Provision

AbstractVastly increased transnational business activity in recent decades has been accompanied by controversy over how to cope with its social and environmental impacts. The most prominent policy response thus far consists of international guidelines. We investigate to what extent and why citizens in a high-income country are willing to restrain companies to improve environmental and social conditions in other countries. Exploiting a real-world referendum in Switzerland, we use choice and vignette experiments with a representative sample of voters (N = 3,010) to study public demand for such regulation. Our results show that citizens prefer strict and unilateral rules (with a substantial variation of preferences by general social and environmental concern) while correctly assessing their consequences. Moreover, exposure to international norms increases demand for regulation. These findings highlight that democratic accountability can be a mechanism that motivates states to contribute to collective goods even if not in their economic interest and that awareness of relevant international norms among citizens can enhance this mechanism.

The Human Rights Responsibilities of Corporations in Global Supply Chains

In a globalised economy, transnational corporations from all sectors are directly or indirectly linked to global supply chains, in particular through transnational business activities and foreign investments. That this represents a potential threat to individuals and the environment has been revealed by persistent human rights abuses and damage to the environment. In practice, human rights abuses by transnational corporations often take place in countries of the Global South and affect the most vulnerable people, such as women workers, child labourers and residents of poor and rural areas. Nevertheless, the existing international human rights system does not impose direct human rights obligations on private actors, including transnational corporations. The responsibilities of transnational corporations for human rights in global supply chains are mainly based on a patchwork of soft regulations. In recent years, however, new initiatives have emerged at the national and international level, such as the the development of an internationally legally binding treaty to regulate business activities with respect to human rights or domestic legislation for corporate due diligence obligations. Most of these initiatives emphasise the role of the State in incorporating a “mediated” approach to the human rights responsibility of transnational corporations. This article explores recent developments connected to the human rights responsibilities of corporations and discusses their feasibility under international human rights law.

The first binding treaty on business and human rights: a deconstruction of the EU’s negotiating experience along the lines of institutional incoherence and legal theories

ABSTRACT When the UN Human Rights Council initiated negotiations towards the first international legally binding instrument for the accountability of transnational business activities, EU Member States opposed it, and EU institutions themselves endeavoured to obstruct it by making it conditional upon the widening of its scope, as to cover all domestic companies, too. This move, phrased in human-rights terms, might rather account for the EU's reluctance to have its subsidiaries in developing countries compete with domestic businesses subject to less rigorous due-diligence standards (and thus, lower labour costs). Developing countries replicated that human dignity resides in countries not being imposed harmful developmental trajectories for market-competition purposes, and in indigent workers not being prevented from seeking survival means in domestic employment. Mentioned stalemate exposed frictions between different EU institutions, and evoked issues of both EU law and public international law, including: competence demarcation between Brussels and Member States; 'extraterritoriality' of EU obligations in (negotiating) foreign policy; responsibility of non-state actors. Furthermore, these negotiations unearthed the problematic 'identity' of human-rights policymaking, in its intersection with the concrete needs of its addressees. The EU has risked to either disrupt the initiative, or lose sight of the stances of this project's actual stakeholders: the poorer.

Legal responsibility in an entangled world

Responsibility and accountability in entangled global relations are negotiated across jurisdictional boundaries, localities and scales of legality. In this special issue, we trace struggles for corporate accountability from extraction sites in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru to an abandoned asbestos factory in Italy. We enquire into the gap between the legal institutions which govern attributions of responsibility in procedural, tort and corporate laws, lived experiences of harm connected to transnational business activities and moral expectations of responsibility in global relations. In the struggles for justice discussed in this special issue, we detect potential ways of rethinking ascriptions of responsibility to reflect the deep entanglements of our economies.

The impact of taxation on transnational business activity: why it happens, how it happens, how to neutralize distortions

The impact of taxation on transnational business activity: why it happens, how it happens, how to neutralize distortions

Contemporary responses to Businesses’ negative Human Rights impact

The article provides a panoramic overview of the factual and legal problems created by transnational business activities that negatively impact human rights around the world, and critically analyzes the strengths and gaps of the various international initiatives created in order to address businesses impact on human rights. The main three international initiatives analyzed are the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights, and the Draft Treaty on Business and Human Rights. The article intends to organize the vast literature on BHR, serve as a departure point for those interested in researching on this sub-area of international human rights law, and to provide critical analysis of the international legal responses created to address these contemporary human rights

New Frontiers of Profit and Risk: The Fourth Industrial Revolution’s Impact on Business and Human Rights

ABSTRACT The Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterised by the fusion of physical, digital, and biological technologies, will have profound social and economic consequences. But what impact will it have on human rights? This article critically interrogates key writings and speeches about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which requires reading between the lines of technical, business, and policy-orientated materials that rarely address human rights explicitly. The findings are a mix of good and bad news. First, the traditional linkage between economic competition and violations of bodily integrity is weakening as new forms of profitability in tomorrow’s digital ecosystems require empowered and creative individuals. However, these celebratory visions of the profitable interpenetration of our bodies, hardware and virtual worlds has a dark side. The next-generation of human rights violations arising from transnational business activities will be increasingly subtle, diffuse, and sophisticated.

Nonjudicial business regulation and community access to remedy

AbstractRedress for communities harmed by transnational business activity remains elusive. This paper examines community efforts to access redress for human rights‐related harms via recourse to transnational nonjudicial mechanisms (NJMs) – a prevalent but widely debated instrument of transnational business regulation. Drawing together insights from theoretical debates surrounding nonjudicial regulation and evidence from a major empirical study of human rights redress claims in Indonesia and India, the paper explores the conditions under which NJMs can support community access to remedy. Three conditions are shown to be central in enabling some degree of NJM effectiveness: the institutional design of regulatory strategies, the institutional empowerment of regulatory institutions, and social empowerment of affected communities and their supporters. While all three conditions are required in some measure to underpin effective NJM interventions, these conditions can be combined in varying ways in different contexts to underpin either top–down or bottom–up pathways to redress. The former derives its primary influence from institutional authority and capacity, while the latter relies more heavily on diffuse societal leverage in support of community claims. These findings have significant implications for theoretical debates about the capacity and limits of nonjudicial regulatory approaches to support human rights redress within decentered contexts of transnational regulation where both regulatory power and agency are widely diffused.

The State Duty to Protect Against Human Rights Violations Through Transnational Business Activities

Transnational corporations are currently not formally bound by international human rights obligations. Instead, states have a duty to protect individuals against human rights abuses by third parties, including corporations. While it is undisputed that this obligation extends to all individuals living on the territory of the respective state, the extraterritorial scope of the duty to protect remains contested. This is especially the case for human rights violations through transnational business activities. The state on whose territory the violation occurs has a duty to protect human rights by adopting and implementing labour and environmental laws applicable in that state. However, it is less clear if and to what extent the state of the main seat of the mother company or the global ordering company — the ‘home state’ — also has a human rights duty to regulate transnational business activity. This article argues that such a duty can be based on existing human rights doctrine and standards of general international law such as the ‘no harm’ rule and the due diligence principle. It argues that states have a duty to regulate transnational business activities of corporations over which they exercise jurisdiction if human rights violations caused by such activities are predictable and preventable. In its final part, the article assesses various approaches in state practice which could be seen as instruments in the fulfillment of the duty to regulate transnational business activities.

The State Duty to Protect against Human Rights Violations through Transnational Business Activities

Transnational corporations are currently not formally bound by international human rights obligations. Instead, states have a duty to protect individuals against human rights abuses by third parties, including corporations. While it is undisputed that this obligation extends to all individuals living on the territory of the respective state, the extraterritorial scope of the duty to protect remains contested. This is especially the case for human rights violations through transnational business activities. The state on whose territory the violation occurs has a duty to protect human rights by adopting and implementing labour and environmental laws applicable in that state. However, it is less clear if and to what extent the state of the main seat of the mother company or the global ordering company — the ‘home state’ — also has a human rights duty to regulate transnational business activity. This article argues that such a duty can be based on existing human rights doctrine and standards of general international law such as the ‘no harm’ rule and the due diligence principle. It argues that states have a duty to regulate transnational business activities of corporations over which they exercise jurisdiction if human rights violations caused by such activities are predictable and preventable. In its final part, the article assesses various approaches in state practice which could be seen as instruments in the fulfilment of the duty to regulate transnational business activities.

The Merowe Dam Project – When Does the Coin Flip from Legal Business Activity to Criminal Behavior? Reflections on the Concept of Guarantor’s Liablity in the Context of Transnational Business Activities

The individual liability of corporate officers for crimes that are often framed as transnational human rights abuses is much debated. While it seems that some standards of liability are developing in the field of international criminal law, standards of criminal liability in cases where the alleged crimes do not amount to international crimes remain to some extent unclear. This article will examine a concrete case that was investigated by the Frankfurt/Main prosecutor’s office. Additionally, it will be considered whether international soft law standards on corporate human rights due diligence have an influence on how the existing standards of guarantor’s liability, and especially that of principals (Geschaftsherrenhaftung), are to be interpreted in these cases.

The Role of Business in Transforming the Political Organization of the World

Having moved to the global level, capitalist political economy today is turning into a dominant way of governance in world politics, undermining the state-centrist model that has been developing since the time of the Westphalian peace treaties. As a result, we are witnessing a Schumpeterian phenomenon of “creative destruction” i.e., destruction of old accompanied by creation of new. The current world politics is dominated by the logic of destruction, and this destruction is not limited to changing interstate relations, as it is represented in most studies, but involves at the same time at least three levels of political organization of the world, forming a synergy effect: the level of the Westphalian world order; the level of interstate relations; the level of the national state. The Westphalian ststem is being blurred largely by transnational business activity. Entrepreneursinnovators form capitalism of co-participation. This capitalism rests not on interest, but on values and social ties that unite people in networks. Examples of such capitalism are various forms of sharing, peer-topeer networks, wiki-platforms, block-chain technology. Capitalism of sharing unites in- formational networks and human potential, the main resource of such capitalism is precisely human capital, human trust and social relations. The sharing is being transmitted to the international political sphere, supplementing the principle of the Westphalian sovereignty with the potential of eventually replacing it. At the same time, practices are being introduced into the political organization of the world from other projects of the political organization of the world, in particular Islamic (Islamic banks, hawala money transfer system, etc.).

Illicit Transnational Enterprises and the State

This article aims at contributing to the current debate over the effects of illicit transnational activities on states. Recent avenues of conceptualizing transnational organized crime call for defining it as an economic activity with the scope of profit, rather than a criminal activity. Illicit transnational business activities largely follow the trends in development of legal business. The transnational criminal enterprises emerged in parallel to the growth of multinational corporations, making use of the same opportunities as legal business did. The article discusses violence by illicit enterprises and reviews current theoretical debate on the linkages between illicit enterprises and the state. The paper then proceeds with an empirical analysis of the effects of the presence of illicit enterprises on state weakness. We have hypothesized that weak states may have higher presence of criminal businesses. The findings generally confirm significant correlation between the two variables. State fragility is positively correlated with the presence of organized crime. Testing these results against empirical evidence partially confirms the findings. However, this correlation might be weakened by the observation that the presence of illicit enterprises alone does not determine state fragility or strength.

International Investment Arbitration: Development, Controversies, and Future Outlook

Globalization is a prominent feature of modern society. However, a by-product of increased transnational business activities, especially foreign investments, is an increased number of disputes. Consequently, investment arbitration has, in recent decades, experienced rapid development and much attention as an effective means of dispute resolution and investment promotion. The first section of this paper describes the origin and development of international investment arbitration with a specific focus on the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Although international investment law and ICSID arbitration both play significant roles in dispute resolution, scholars often criticize them for their legitimacy deficits. In the second section, the current issues and challenges facing international investment law and ICSID arbitration are presented and discussed. These include the inconsistency of investment treaties and agreements, potential arbitrator bias, and conflicts between an investor’s private rights and the host state’s public interests. To meet the changing needs of both investors and the public, the field of international investment arbitration must continue to progress and evolve. The third and final section addresses the ongoing evolution of international investment arbitration by reviewing possible remedies and improvements to the current system and presenting future trends anticipated by institutions and scholars.

The Lizardi Brothers: A Mexican Family Business and the Expansion of New Orleans, 1825–1846

The Lizardi Brothers:A Mexican Family Business and the Expansion of New Orleans, 1825–1846 Linda K. Salvucci (bio) and Richard J. Salvucci (bio) Throughout much of the twentieth century, diplomatic and economic historians of the antebellum United States defined and dominated the fields of hemispheric relations and American capitalism, respectively. In recent years, however, cultural historians of the antebellum United States have turned their attention to the role of the U.S. South in the broader exchange of peoples, ideas, and goods. Historians using innovative literary approaches address questions of race and identity in connecting the U.S. South to Latin America and beyond, while scholars of the “new” history of capitalism aim to deepen our understanding of the business of slavery in southern economic development.1 These two fields at times converge on the subject of empire, as the Gulf Caribbean is ever more frequently characterized as the “American Mediterranean” by U.S. as well as Cuban historians.2 Indeed, no analysis [End Page 759] of the antebellum United States is complete without integrating perspectives from the southern neighbors themselves—that is, by looking from south to north, rather than reflexively from north to south. In particular, the rapidly changing political and economic landscape of Mexico in the early nineteenth century impacted in highly significant ways the expansion of the U.S. South’s premier port, New Orleans. A Mexican family business, the Lizardi Brothers, was at the center of key financial transactions in New Orleans in the 1830s and 1840s. Through the family’s transnational business activities in the Americas and Europe, the Lizardi connected New Orleans to Texas, to Mexico and Cuba, and to the Gulf Caribbean and the Atlantic world more generally during this transformative period in the development of global capitalism. The port of New Orleans played a prominent role in the economic development of the antebellum South and the United States, a role far more complex than just as a point of deposit for the trans-Mississippi Valley.3 By the 1830s and early 1840s, the city’s exports matched or surpassed those of New York in value, although the value of New Orleans’s imports remained far below those of eastern cities.4 The peculiar nature of these imports, especially specie, had monetary implications that far exceeded the absolute size of the import trade and that affected the economy of the nation. Silver specie was a significant component of the U.S. domestic money supply and a source of reserves to the banking system. Because much of the specie arriving in New Orleans originated in trade with Mexico and Spanish Cuba, the nature, mechanisms, and merchant families associated with this exchange take on a special significance. Among the chief participants in this trade was the Lizardi family, who originated in Veracruz, Mexico. Strikingly, the Lizardi maintained their involvement in the United States even as they functioned [End Page 760] as major financiers to the First Mexican Republic (1824–1835), also known formally as the Federation. Since money is fungible, the profits that the Lizardi gained from their activities in Mexico financed and supported their activities in New Orleans. For this reason, the Lizardi and their Mexican connections deserve particular attention.5 With the exception of Antonio López de Santa Anna, with whom the Lizardi had an intimate connection, there were no Mexicans of greater importance for the United States in the 1830s and early 1840s than the Lizardi family. They were an integral part, however briefly, of the history of capitalism in the United States, especially during the Panic of 1837, the most disruptive financial crisis of the antebellum U.S. economy. Although historians of the United States often mention the Lizardi and their importance, Mexican history and its sources, on the one hand, and the local records of Louisiana, on the other, allow for a fuller understanding of the family’s origins, activities, and influence during this critical period. While focusing on the Lizardi places Mexico and Mexican players firmly at the center of local, regional, national, and international dealings, the family’s deliberately opaque actions and sketchy records are obstacles to producing a complete picture of their complex...

Od konfrontacji do kooperacji – ewolucja postawy ONZ w stosunku do korporacji transnarodowych

Transnational corporations started to play more and more important role in the international relations, along with accelerating globalization and the growing meaning of the soft, non-military sources of power. The UN made several attempts to regulate transnational business activities by working on appropriate legal solutions. One of them concerned establishing the Code of Conduct for transnational corporations. Gradually, it started to be clear that the differences in the states interests and the opportunities that were offered to corporations by globalization made it difficult to introduce effective mechanisms to limit and control international enterprises. There was a need to change the UN’s attitude towards these actors from confrontation to cooperation, what was reflected by the creation of the Global Compact initiative. In this article there is analyzed the evolution of the UN’s approach to transnational corporations – its genesis, course, and results.

Genealogies of Lex Mercatoria

historical study of mercantile law has, without a question, much to teach both business and private international lawyers. Such study requires a sophisticated methodology that combines the rigour of professional historians with understanding of doctrinal complexity. However, most of the popular historical narratives about the “old” law merchant have little to contribute to historical scholarship and appear instead primarily concerned with genealogy: their principal aim is to inspire their audience or to provide argumentative weapons to their party in the modern debates about lex mercatoria and the governance of transnational business activities. In comprehensive historical accounts and casual references to a common historical consciousness alike, the “ancient” law merchant is presented as an autonomous, cosmopolitan, transnational legal system. This imagery is also recurring in the modern conflict-of-laws literature, as well as domestic commercial law. It permeates historical narratives in comparative law and doctrinal legal history. ancient law merchant even serves as case-study material for legal and economic theorists. power of this historical imagery masks its weak historical validation. Especially in recent years, a number of legal historians have refuted much of lex mercatoria genealogy, providing alternative stories about the legal treatment of commerce in medieval and early modern Europe. However, such historical revisionism has so far made few inroads among mercatorists or even in the mainstream of international business law: the romance of the law merchant still casts a powerful spell.That the mercatorists’ historical imagery persists in spite of these refutations suggests that what matters, for the debate, is not so much what actually happened, but what projections into the past align best with present circumstances and what constructions of the past are used to justify explanations of the present. On the one hand, historical narratives as a whole support the notion of a transnational, cosmopolitan law merchant. On the other hand, when examined in detail or in contrast to each other they illustrate the internal divisions within the mercatorist alliance. In an earlier study that illustrated this point [Hatzimihail, The Many Lives - and Faces - of the Lex Mercatoria: History as Genealogy in International Business Law, 71 L. & CONTEMP. PROBS. 169 (2008)], I examined in detail two paradigmatic narratives of lex mercatoria historiography: the principal historical accounts provided by the two founding fathers of the modern lex mercatoria, Clive Schmitthoff and Berthold Goldman. Schmitthoff and Goldman were instrumental in the formation and shaping of the lex mercatoria discourse from its beginnings in the early 1960s until the late 1980s. More generally, they played important roles in the academic elaboration of international commercial law and international commercial arbitration. They are also regarded as emblematic of the two basic approaches to lex mercatoria—with Schmitthoff emphasizing the use of state and nonstate sources, and Goldman insisting on the stateless (a-national) character of lex mercatoria. Of their many works, I chose for my textual analysis two classic essays providing a comprehensive outlook of the authors’ respective worldviews and normative projects: genealogical narratives form a vital part of the argument in both essays.The present essay largely reprises my previous examination of Schmitthoff’s and Goldman’s historical narratives, in Sections III and IV respectively. It also includes a third case study – the mercatorist historical narrative of Friedrich Juenger, a private international lawyer sympathetic to lex mercatoria (Section V). Unlike Schmitthoff and Goldman, Juenger is not a canonical figure of lex mercatoria, but his text is characteristic of his own discourse and relates to the two canonical narratives. three texts considered are also separated by each other chronologically by a distance of around two decades: Schmitthoff in the early 1960s, Goldman in the early 1980s and Juenger in 2000. different point in time that each was written should probably be taken into account, as having somewhat influenced both the ideas expressed and their explicitness (indeed, the point in each author’s career at the time of writing must be also be considered), but the ideas expressed here continue to represent different streams of thought that remain alive – and distinct – to this day. It would be a mistake, therefore, to see the three texts as representing a unitary evolution of thinking about lex mercatoria, old and new.The three case studies are preceded by another sort of genealogy in Section II: a survey of historical invocations from the early modern era to the early twentieth century, i.e. the period prior to the emergence of a new lex mercatoria.

“Woman” on the move: mobile subjectivities after intersectionality

Purpose–The paper originated in challenges trying to theorize and research practices and processes of actors engaged in transnational activities for business and everyday life. Key concern was the assumption that actors’ identities remain the same regardless of time/space. While intersectional analysis once seemed a reasonable analytical approach the authors wondered about starting from identity-based categorical schemes in a world where mobility may be ever more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring. Thus, the paper addresses limitations of intersectional analysis in such situations and advances its recasting via mobile conceptualizations, redressing its analytical purchase for contemporary subject formation.Design/methodology/approach– Discusses emergence of intersectionality at a particular point in time, its success and proliferation, and more recent critiques of these ideas. Develops alternative conceptualization – mobile subjectivities – via literatures on mobilities in the context of globalization. Illustrates the value of these arguments with ethnographic examples from a multi-sited ethnographic project and analyses. Concludes by examining implications for new feminist theorizations under neoliberalism and globalization.Findings– Observing the constitution of a “mobile selfhood” in actual transnational business activities is a step toward making sense of complex processes in contemporary subject formation under globalized market neoliberalism.Research limitations/implications– “Mobile subjectivities” suggest that analyses of oppression and subordination must be ongoing, no matter which “new subjectivities” may appear under “the latest regime.”Originality/value– Theoretical and empirical analyses facilitated a reconceptualization of intersectionality as a mobile, precarious, and transitory accomplishment of selfhood temporarily fixed by the neoliberal rhetoric of “choice” and “self-empowerment.” This is of particular value for understanding transnational practices and processes of contemporary organizational actors.

Implantation spatiale du commerce euro-africain d’exportation de véhicules d’occasion à Bruxelles

This article examines the evolution of the spatial setting-up of the Euro-African secondhand cars exportation business in Brussels. This transnational business activity is operated by people with immigrant background and exclusively oriented toward other groups of migrants. The chosen gateway is that of conflicts linked to the urban planning of this neighbourhood. After a first period of relative indifference, urban planers’ reaction moved to a frontal approach seeking the departure of secondhand cars. Tensions around this neighbourhood are even stronger today as a process of gentrification is causing the appearance of a new population profile in this city’s area.