Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In September of 1988, the government of Jamaica announced the establishment of the US$2 million Jamaica Digiport International facility to promote foreign investments. The Digiport was established to provide offshore information processing services to companies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The decision to establish the Digiport was originally conceived in 1984 as a joint venture between the Jamaican government, the Japanese Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) and the American Satellite Company (ASC), a United States telecommunications company. However, after four years of negotiation, the Digiport was approved however with significant modifications in the multinational that would be involved after a major restructuring of the domestic telecommunications sector. This paper examines the international changes in the telecommunications sector during the Digiport negotiations and the domestic responses to these global transformations. First, it looks at the structural transformations in the international telecommunications regime, INTELSAT, and the implications of these changes for state-multinational relations. Second, it analyzes the domestic economic restructurings that were implemented in response to the global transformations and their impact on the closing of the sector to competition and the new state-multinational alliances. The paper concludes that the new state-multinational alliances and the closing of Jamaica's telecommunications sector to was the strategic response to the new liberalization of the international telecommunications sector and were facilitated by the role played by the corporations in INTELSAT's structure of governance.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite being directly affected by decisions made in panels of the Dispute Settlement Body, the private sectors of society do not have standing to litigate before the WTO. In order to submit private-sector cases to WTO, there is a deep concern of private parties to strengthen their relations with government officials of the states. The influence of private sectors in the conduct of foreign policy of a state depends on mechanisms do not always institutionalized, that allow private interests become a matter of national interest. The purpose of this paper is to examine the means by which private parties affect State trade policies through the comparison between the political context of the USA and EC, in which there are rules that stipulates conditions in front of which governments must defend the interests of private parties, and the Brazilian political context, in which the choice of the case that will presented to the WTO is essentially political. We approach these questions by examining evidence from the EC and USA dataset on norms and WTO disputes, as well as interviews with Brazilian Commission officials and leading members of business associations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While the Aid/Growth literature is voluminous, the results of studies tracing the effects of aid on economic growth are disparate and, in some cases, contradictory. The question that must be posed, then, is whether growth is too distant a variable to use as a measure of aid effectiveness. This paper seeks to overcome this potential problem by examining the individual avenues through which aid is assumed to cause growth and test whether aid has the assumed effects within each sector. Many studies on aid have pointed to the problem of fungibility in examining aid effectiveness; we argue that regardless of whether aid increases expenditure in recipient’s budgets, sector aid may have a positive impact on a sector’s performance. While recipients may divert donor’s funds to different sectors, donors still have oversight over the intended projects and have incentives to ensure the projects will be successful. Because of this additional donor oversight, we argue that while aid projects may not impact sector expenditures, they will improve sector performance. To test this hypothesis, we examine whether education, health, and infrastructure aid have a significant positive impact on the performance indicators in each respective sector. We accomplish this using a dataset including aid data disaggregated by sector from the Project Level Aid (PLAID) database, an NSF-funded collaboration between Brigham Young University and the College of William and Mary.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The term “cross-sector partnerships“ refers to a strategy which counts on the collaboration of actors from the public, the business and the civil sector in order to solve problems which none of them would be able to solve by itself – at least not to the desired degree. While the normative aspirations concerning these types of collaboration are often far-reaching there is still a lack of critical reflections on basic principles, which would be necessary in order to go beyond ad-hoc problem-solving and to allow for an open debate on the normative foundations and implications of “cross-sector partnerships“.
The most important conclusion of this paper is that the problem-solving attitude that is reflected in the discussions on “cross-sector partnerships” hinders the establishment of general rules for this new type of social cooperation, which in turn leaves the question of “who contributes what under which conditions to what” open to the participants themselves. This means that none of them – especially when it comes to the business and the civil sector – can be made accountable for non-cooperation which leaves their actions subject to arbitrariness and puts them into a powerful position.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite being directly affected by decisions made in panels of the Dispute Settlement Body, the private sectors of society do not have standing to litigate before the WTO. In order to submit private-sector cases to WTO, there is a deep concern of pri