Unilateral Rules Research Articles

Digital Services Tax: Comparative Analysis of Individual OECD Countries and Potential Risks of Introducing a Digital Tax in Russia

The need to ensure compliance with the fiscal interests of the state requires thetransformation of essential approaches to the regulatory regulation of tax relationsin the context of the regulation of the tax base taxed in Russia. At the same time,the problems that arise when taxing the activities of digital companies abroad arerelevant for Russia. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that digitalizationhas allowed companies to access a large number of customers around the worldwithout a physical presence in the countries where these customers are located.Thus, there is a discrepancy between the level of physical and economic presencein the market country. Currently, international tax coordination can no longer beidentified only with traditional double tax treaties. In the absence of consensus,many jurisdictions have begun to formulate unilateral rules for taxation of thedigital economy. Inconsistency of these rules is likely to increase the tax burden ofa number of multinational corporations, given that each state seeks to protect itsinterests. The author discusses national digital taxes introduced in OECD countries.It is proposed to divide these taxes into three groups: income taxes, consumptiontaxes (VAT for electronic services) and hybrid taxes. Based on a comparative legalanalysis of the legislation of the states in which digital taxes have been introduced,possible scenarios for tax regulation in Russia been developed. It is concluded thatthe introduction of a digital tax in Russia is not appropriate. In addition, in the contextof the introduction of various benefits for IT companies increasing the tax burden inthe field through the introduction of a new tax does not seem logical.

Implementation and Obstacle of Reward and Punishment at Pesantren Al-Azhar-Gresik

This paper is a case study that aims to take a closer look at how punishments and rewards are implemented at the Al-Azhar Islamic Boarding School and what the obstacles are in both male and female dormitories. The data obtained through observation and in-depth interviews. This study found that the Islamic boarding schools have four categories of rules that if violated, the perpetrators will be sanctioned, namely ritual, cleanliness, behavior, and security. The form of punishment is graded ranging from verbal reprimand to being fired from the pesantren or even the formal school. Meanwhile, there are a number of obstacles in the application of rewards and punishment, namely: inconsistency, unilateral rules, lack of knowledge of child psychology, minimal facilities and infrastructure, and imbalance between rewards and punishments

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.

Zu den Arten von Kollisionsnormen in der Lehre von der Statutenkollision

Abstract Types of conflict rules in the theory of statuta. It is commonly accepted in the history of Conflict of Laws that there has been a “Copernican turning point” when Savigny introduced multilateral conflict rules and thereby abandoned the system of unilateral conflict rules of the Theory of statuta. The article challenges this narrative and argues on the one hand that the statutists already used multilateral conflict rules and on the other that their unilateral rules often reached similar results to modern multilateral conflict rules because of their universal nature.

The Wild Differences in Law when Trading in Wild Animals: a US and EU Perspective

This paper aims to show the differences between a regular animal trade and trade in wildlife in the European Union (EU) and in the United States (USA/US). Although the ideas towards using the international sale of animals are similar in the US legal system and in the EU legal system, they have very different foundations. The European model aims for policy – neutral rules of private international law agreed on a multilateral basis, whereas the American approach uses unilateral rules of private international law based on a country’s own domestic interests. Even though there are still no binding international conflict of law rules that would apply to contracts between parties from the US and European countries, this problem could easily be solved in contract law by choosing the law applicable to the contract. However, though the conflict of law rules in the situation where one of the States of the USA is involved might be different in each case. That is the reason why the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was drafted. Unfortunately, the conclusion based on the material presented in the article is that CITES is not effective enough. Therefore, although the law on the sale of animals leads to similar solutions in USA and in EU, even though it is based on different legal systems (common law and civil law countries), it leads to totally different solutions concerning the law on wild animals.

Do Group Decision Rules Affect Trust? A Laboratory Experiment on Group Decision Rules and Trust

Enhanced participation has been prescribed as the way forward for improving democratic decision making while generating positive attributes like trust. Yet we do not know the extent to which rules affect the outcome of decision making. This article investigates how different group decision rules affect group trust by testing three ideal types of decision rules (i.e., a Unilateral rule, a Representative rule and a ‘Non‐rule’) in a laboratory experiment. The article shows significant differences between the three decision rules on trust after deliberation. Interestingly, however, it finds that the Representative rule yields more trust than the Non‐rule and also significantly more trust than the Unilateral rule, when analysing the results at group level. These findings challenge the theoretical understanding by, for example, deliberative normative theorists that more inclusive, consensual and non‐hierarchical decision‐making procedures enhance trust vis‐à‐vis other more hierarchical decision‐making procedures.

Reversibility of general 1D linear cellular automata over the binary field [formula omitted] under null boundary conditions

The reversibility of cellular automata(CA) has long been studied but there are still many problems untouched. This paper tackles the reversibility problem of the general case concerning 1D CA under null boundary conditions defined by linear rules over the binary field Z2. Although transition matrix has been widely used for some special linear CA(LCA) rules, it has severe limitations: its complexity depends on the number of cells, and determining its reversibility becomes another unsolved tough problem for general rules. By constructing deterministic finite automata(DFA) of the de Bruijn graph presentation of CA, we conclude the reversibility problem of all 1D linear rules over Z2 under null boundary conditions. It turns out that any 1D LCA, except for some unilateral rules, over Z2 under null boundary conditions can be reversible once having a proper number of cells, and DFA provides an efficient way to find those numbers. Moreover, the complexity of the DFA solution is independent of the number of cells. In addition, the relative low complexity of DFA can be further significantly reduced by using only a small part of it.

Negotiating conflict resolution mechanisms for transboundary water treaties: A transaction cost approach

Conflict resolution mechanisms are recognised as indispensable constituting elements of transboundary water agreements. Earlier studies confirm, however, that such mechanisms are either incomplete, unsophisticated or absent from treaties. We argue that transaction costs, which occur during treaty negotiation, may constitute a barrier to the adoption of conflict resolution mechanisms in water treaties. Transaction costs are never equal and depend largely on the context in which negotiations take place. A content analysis of the treaties in the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database demonstrates that the adoption of conflict resolution mechanisms to transboundary water treaties is not random, but may be affected by external factors that influence the transaction cost of negotiating such mechanisms. Water scarcity and a history of cooperative hydro-relations are factors that coincide with the presence of conflict resolution mechanisms in treaties and are therefore considered to lower transaction costs. External resource dependency is believed to stir transaction costs to such an extent that it prevents the adoption of mature mechanisms. The same goes for political freedom, political heterogeneity and the presence of colonial signatories as these factors correlate with mechanism absence and the adoption of a low number of conflict resolution mechanisms per treaty. The effect of hydrological variability resulted insignificant, indicating that variability remains largely ignored by negotiators of transboundary water treaties. Our research further shows that if a mechanism for conflict resolution contains one element of maturity (e.g. institutionalisation or an activation procedure based on a unilateral rule) other elements of maturity are also likely to be present, providing negotiators with an incentive to negotiate conflict resolution mechanisms with at least one mature characteristic. Finally, the adoption of a high number of mechanisms coincides with the presence of institutionalised forms for conflict resolution, supporting the incentive of negotiating more than two mechanisms per treaty.

Perpetual what? Injury, Sovereignty and a Cosmopolitan View of Immigration

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of ‘cosmopolitan spaces' of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.

Strategy-proof probabilistic rules for expected utility maximizers

We consider social choice rules which select a lottery over outcomes for each profile of individual preferences. Agents are assumed to have preferences over lotteries satisfying the axioms of expected utility. We exhibit a large class of rules satisfying strategy-proofness. All these rules are obtained by combining one of the following principles: (1) start from a fixed subset of lotteries, and for each profile let one fixed agent choose her preferred lottery from that subset (we call them unilateral rules); or, (2) start from two fixed lotteries and a rule assigning weights to each of them depending on the coalition of agents which prefer one of the two lotteries to the other; let the outcome at each profile be the convex combination of these two given lotteries according to the weights which correspond to them at that profile (these rules are called duples). All probabilistic mixtures (convex combinations or integrals) of unilateral and duple rules satisfying some additional and natural requirements are strategy-proof. Because we are facing a wide class of procedures, we investigate the possibility of designing some which are not only strategy-proof but also continuous or even smooth in their responses to changes in preferences. Smoothness requirements are not only attractive per se, but they can also be expected to help in telling apart different types of rules. Notice that unilateral rules can be very smooth, while no duple can even be continuous. Yet, continuity can be regained by combining a continuum of duples: we provide an example of a continuous strategy-proof probabilistic rule which is an integral of duples. However, there is a limit as to how smooth a rule can be without resorting to unilateral schemes. We prove that any strategy-proof probabilistic function of class C 2 must indeed be also a convex combination of unilateral schemes.

Recent Developments in Multilateral Policy Reform

Theoretical work on the reform of tariffs and quantity restrictions on trade has been focused on deriving recommendations for Pareto improving changes in policy, as in the optimal (closed economy) tax reform literature (e.g. Diewert 1978). There has been an emphasis on coming up with simple answers to practical policy questions (Which way is up?) and checkable evaluation criteria for policy reform proposals. The literature on tariff and quota reform can be divided into two subsets: the first deals with policy reform in a single, usually small, country (unilateral policy reform) and the second considers reforms in a many country world (multilateral policy reform). On unilateral policy reform concerning tariffs, we refer the reader to Foster and Sonnenschein (1970), Bertrand and Vanek (1971), Hatta (1977), Smith (1980), Diewert, TurunenRed and Woodland (1989, 1991) and Vousden (1990, Ch. 9); and concerning quotas to Falvey (1988), Anderson and Neary (1992), Neary (1995) and Vousden (1990, Ch. 9). Two broad policy conclusions emerge from this literature. Under various assumptions, proportional reductions of all tariffs and reductions of extreme ad valorem tariffs can be welfare improving. Also, for unilateral changes, relaxations of binding quotas (with no tariffs) and relaxations of quotas with extreme quota premia (when tariffs are present and goods are net substitutes) can produce welfare gains. The second and smaller subset of the international trade literature deals with multilateral changes. Early contributions extend the broad policy conclusions of the unilateral literature to a many country world, but suffer from stringent assumptions such as requirements that all commodities should be net substitutes or that all goods should be normal. Turunen-Red and Woodland (1991) offer a generalization of the unilateral rule for proportional tariff reforms (i.e., that in each country, tariffs should be altered proportionally to a vector of suitably defined shadow prices) and