Astroturf Activism

Corporate influence in government is more than a national issue; it is an international phenomenon. For years, businesses have been infiltrating international legal processes. They secretly lobby lawmakers through front groups: “astroturf” imitations of grassroots organizations. But because this business lobbying is covert, it has been underappreciated in both the literature and the law. This Article unearths the “astroturf activism” phenomenon. It offers an original descriptive account that classifies modes of business access to international officials and identifies harms, then develops a critical analysis of the laws that regulate this access. I show that the perplexing set of access rules for aspiring international lobbyists creates the transparency problem I identify by prohibiting all but covert business access. I argue that the access rules have been rendered obsolete by globalization and fundamental changes in relationships between national governments and multinational business entities. To that historical critique, this Article adds an efficiency account and an evaluation of the law’s conceptual coherence that draws from pluralistic theory. The analysis gives rise to two potential avenues for reform. One proposal would require enhanced disclosures, and the other would offer formal access to business entities, engaging business input but also exposing it. Either potential reform would update the law to better accommodate contemporary business roles in international governance. The stakes, I show, are high. On the one hand, business can offer lawmakers expertise and politically neutral solutions. On the other hand, unchecked business influence can obstruct and neutralize laws aimed at solving critical global problems

Reflections on the EU objectives in addressing aggressive tax planning and harmful tax practices Final Report. CEPS Report November 2019

This Report analyses the EU’s instruments to tackle aggressive tax planning and harmful tax practices. Based on desk research, interviews with stakeholders and expert assessments, it considers the coherence, relevance, and added value of the EU’s approach. The instruments under analysis are found to be internally coherent and consistent with other EU policies and with the international tax agenda, in particular with the OECD/G20 BEPS framework. The Report also confirms the continued relevance of most of the original needs and problems addressed by the EU’s initiatives in the field of tax avoidance. There is also EU added value in having common EU instruments in the field to bolster coordination and harmonise the implementation of tax measures. One cross-cutting issue identified is the impact of digitalisation on corporate taxation. Against this background, the Report outlines potential improvements to the EU tax strategy such as: making EU tax systems fit for the digital era; leading the international debate on tax avoidance; enabling capacity building in Member States and developing countries; strengthening tax good governance in third countries; ensuring a consistent approach at home and abroad; achieving a level playing field for all companies; and increasing tax certainty and legal certainty

Regulatory coherence: blending trade and regulatory policy

Regulatory coherence has over the past four years become a term of art for domestic regulatory systems which interface seamlessly with the systems of other countries. And yet a precise or at least agreed definition remains elusive and descriptions often confuse ends and means. This article sets out to provide greater clarity, and in doing so illustrates that regulatory coherence can be thought of as both an ‘end’ (regulation that supports international trade and investment) and a ‘means’ (good regulatory practice). The adoption by countries of regulatory coherence objectives and practices increasingly blends trade and domestic regulatory policy

A Product Oriented Modelling Concept: Holons for systems synchronisation and interoperability

Nowadays, enterprises are confronted to growing needs for traceability, product genealogy and product life cycle management. To meet those needs, the enterprise and applications in the enterprise environment have to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material and that are managed in shop floor level. Nevertheless, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents the "Holon" modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. Afterwards, we show how the concept of holon can play a major role in ensuring interoperability in the enterprise context

Not just a "second order" problem in a wider economic crisis: systemic challenges for the global trading system

Reform of the multilateral trade regime is not simply a second order problem within a wider economic crisis. The completion of the Doha Round may be a second order question but the global trade regime faces a series of broader systemic challenges beyond the completion of the current negotiations. This paper identifies five challenges: (i) a marked reduction in popular support for open markets in major OECD countries; (ii) the stalling of a transition from one global economic equilibrium to another; (iii) a lack of clarity and agreement on the agenda and objectives for the WTO as we move deeper into the 21st century; (iv) the demand for fairness and justice in the governance of the WTO—the 'legitimacy' question and (v) the rise of regional preferentialism as a challenge to multilateralism. Failure to address these challenges will represent not only a fundamental question for the future of the WTO as the guarantor of the norms and rules of the global trade regime specifically, but also the ability to establish greater coherence in global economic governance overall when its need is arguably greater than at any time since the depression years of the 20th century inter-war period

Dynamic System Adaptation by Constraint Orchestration

For Paradigm models, evolution is just-in-time specified coordination conducted by a special reusable component McPal. Evolution can be treated consistently and on-the-fly through Paradigm's constraint orchestration, also for originally unforeseen evolution. UML-like diagrams visually supplement such migration, as is illustrated for the case of a critical section solution evolving into a pipeline architecture.Comment: 19 page

Better by design: Business preferences for environmental regulatory reform

We present the preferences for environmental regulatory reform expressed by 30 UK businesses and industry bodies from 5 sectors. While five strongly preferred voluntary regulation, seven expressed doubts about its effectiveness, and 18 expressed no general preference between instrument types. Voluntary approaches were valued for flexibility and lower burdens, but direct regulation offered stability and a level playing field. Respondents sought regulatory frameworks that: are coherent; balance clarity, prescription and flexibility; are enabled by positive regulatory relationships; administratively efficient; targeted according to risk magnitude and character; evidence-based and that deliver long-term market stability for regulatees. Anticipated differences in performance between types of instrument can be undermined by poor implementation. Results underline the need for policy makers and regulators to tailor an effective mix of instruments for a given sector, and to overcome analytical, institutional and political barriers to greater coherence, to better coordinate existing instruments and tackle new environmental challenges as they emerge

A Process Approach to Corporate Coherence

We address the notion of 'corporate coherence', recently made prominent by Teece, Rumelt, Dosi and Winter (1994). We argue that the literature is confused on the meaning of the notion (and similar notions) in a number of dimensions. Drawing on insights from market-process theories, we put forward a dynamic understanding of corporate coherence as involving the corporate capacity to strike a favorable balance between the production and the exploitation of new knowledge. This argument is elaborated drawing on Austrian, evolutionary and post- Marshallian economics.Corporate coherence, knowledge, competences

Process Based Management and the Central Role of Dialogical Collective Activity in Organizational Learning. The Case of Work Safety in the Building Industry

The notion of “process”, which describes the cooperation of heterogeneous practices and competences for a given output, has gained a major position in managerial practices for the last twenty years. This paper presents three ideas about organizational dynamics and processes and tests their applicability in the case of work safety improvement in a building company. The first idea is that the success of the process notion shows the central role of “conjoint” (as opposed to “common”) collective activity in organizational learning. Conjoint collective activity is dialogical (“acts speak”) and mediated by the utilization of semiotic systems (languages and technical and managerial tools). The second idea is that organizational learning is neither based on the actors’ individual subjectivity nor on the technological and objective artefacts engaged in the processes, but rather on the reflexive understanding and ongoing redesign of processes by the process actors themselves, in the frame of a reflexive inquiry, a “collective activity about collective activity” which is triggered and kept in motion by axiological judgments (process evaluation). The third idea is that the possibilities to configure processes in a given organization are multiple. The reflexive inquiry enacts a specific social, spatial and time configuration of the process, its “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, which plays a major role in the way actors can make sense of their collective activity and transform it. A longitudinal case study about work safety on the building yards shows that it is difficult to “control out” risk at work once designs have been established, in the frame of the “project execution” process, but it is easier to “design out” risk, when the actors of the process collectively design and redesign their collective activity, from the very first phases of a building project to the end. Therefore a major way to improve safety consists in extending the chronotope of the collective activity under consideration, overcoming the traditional separation between “design / planning” and “execution”. The conclusion summarizes the main theoretical, epistemological and practical issues involved in this research about conjoint collective activity.Business Process; Chronotope; Collective Activity; Collective Sense Making; Dialogism; Inquiry; Process-based Management; Safety Management

The Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Policy Innovations and Impacts. Bertelsmann GED Focus Paper

Why did the member states in what eventually became the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) agree to create the most transformational free trade agreement (FTA) in decades? Equally puzzling, why did all the member states—from the most to the least developed economies in the group—agree to the same, high level of ambition? The answer is simple: CPTPP members wanted to craft an agreement better suited to the global economy of today and tomorrow and were willing to take on board high quality, high ambition commitments to get there