Extend Commitment Protocols with Temporal Regulations: Why and How

The proposal of Elisa Marengo's thesis is to extend commitment protocols to explicitly account for temporal regulations. This extension will satisfy two needs: (1) it will allow representing, in a flexible and modular way, temporal regulations with a normative force, posed on the interaction, so as to represent conventions, laws and suchlike; (2) it will allow committing to complex conditions, which describe not only what will be achieved but to some extent also how. These two aspects will be deeply investigated in the proposal of a unified framework, which is part of the ongoing work and will be included in the thesis.Comment: Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium and Poster Session of the 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI), pages 1-8 (arXiv:1107.1686

Flexibility Provisions in Multilateral Environmental Treaties

In international politics, intergovernmental treaties provide the rules of the game. Similar to private law, treaty designers face a trade-off between flexibility to adjust to unforeseen contingencies and the danger that the binding nature of the treaty and hence, the level of commitment by treaty members, is being undermined if the treaty can be amended too easily. In this paper, we address this problem in the analytical framework of institutional economics, drawing in particular on the incomplete contracts literature. Furthermore, we derive preliminary hypotheses and operational concepts for the measurement of flexibility in international treaties. Based on 400 treaties and supplementary agreements from the field of international environmental law, we provide new insights into the combined application of rules for adoption and entry into force of amendments, as well as provisions for conflict resolution and interpretative development. Using correspondence analysis, we show that treaty provisions can be represented in a two-dimensional property space, where treaties can be arrayed according to the degree of institutionalisation as well as along a flexibility dimension. --

DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AND THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE WTO IN MAKING TRADE POLICY – AN ANALYSIS

Trade and investment are of paramount importance to achieve sustainable development thereby eradicating poverty. Developing countries were strongly arguing on this issue. Their argument emanates from the fact that the terms of trade between the developing and developed countries are unfair. All the developing countries realized that they needed the WTO to negotiate export market access particularly in highly protected sectors like agriculture and textiles, and to defend themselves against non-tariff protection from developed countries. The developing countries constitute for a four-fifths in the WTO, only a small minority are active in it. Weak participation in the WTO is largely a reflection and extension of policy-making deficits at home. In line with this they are participating in WTO and redesigning their trade policies in enhancing the domestic trade and contribute for the global trade. This article explores the GATT/WTO policies and their impact on the trade and development of developing countries. It also highlights the general arrangements/preferences available to developing countries by EU and other developed world and it provides good trade policy with specific objectives and indicators that are important for the developing countries.Developing countries, WTO, GATT, Trade Policy Doha Conference, Tariff

A family of loss-tolerant quantum coin flipping protocols

We present a family of loss-tolerant quantum strong coin flipping protocols; each protocol differing in the number of qubits employed. For a single qubit we obtain a bias of 0.4, reproducing the result of Berl\'{i}n et al. [Phys. Rev. A 80, 062321 (2009)], while for two qubits we obtain a bias of 0.3975. Numerical evidence based on semi-definite programming indicates that the bias continues to decrease as the number of qubits is increased but at a rapidly decreasing rate

The Usefulness of Corruptible Elections

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that, while elections may provide a disincentive for rent seeking, this disincentive (1) need not actually materialise, and (2), is not necessarily correlated with the integrity of the electoral protocol. We next consider the ability of village-level elections in rural China to reduce rent seeking, and the extent to which this ability varies as the elections are more or less corruptible. We find that in practice, even elections that appear quite corruptible provide a strong disincentive to rent seeking. Moreover, our results indicate which types of electoral reform lead to more effective popular oversight of leaders, and which do not.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39988/3/wp602.pd

Computing Markov-perfect optimal policies in business-cycle models

Time inconsistency is an essential feature of many policy problems. This paper presents and compares three methods for computing Markov-perfect optimal policies in stochastic nonlinear business cycle models. The methods considered include value function iteration, generalized Euler equations, and parameterized shadow prices. In the context of a business cycle model in which a fiscal authority chooses government spending and income taxation optimally, although lacking the ability to commit, we show that the solutions obtained using value function iteration and generalized Euler equations are somewhat more accurate than that obtained using parameterized shadow prices. Among these three methods, we show that value function iteration can be applied easily, even to environments that include a risk-sensitive fiscal authority and/or inequality constraints on government spending. We show that the risk-sensitive fiscal authority lowers government spending and income taxation, reducing the disincentive to accumulate wealth that households face

Veto Players and Policy Trade-Offs- An Intertemporal Approach to Study the Effects of Political Institutions on Policy

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the expense of the ability to change policy when necessary. This paper disputes that assertion from an intertemporal perspective, drawing from transaction cost economics and repeated game theory and showing that some countries might have both more credibility and more adaptability than others. More generally, the paper argues that, when studying the effects of political institutions on policy outcomes, a perspective of intertemporal politics might lead to predictions different from those emanating from more a-temporal approaches.Political institutions, Public policies, Veto players, Policy adaptability, Policy stability, Intertemporal, Credibility, Repeated games