14 research outputs found
Governing Sovereign Bankruptcy: Writing International Rules for Rewriting National Debts
This thesis examines three sets of recent initiatives aimed at reforming the international regime for sovereign debt restructuring. The first involved changes to the rules governing IMF lending and their role in triggering debt restructurings. The second entailed reforms to sovereign bond contracts in order to facilitate smoother restructuring processes. The third took place within the UN, where states advanced the idea of an international hard-law approach to debt restructuring but settled for a set of soft-law principles. Taken together, these initiatives had a mixed impact on the regime. Contract reforms strengthened bond restructuring processes; IMF reforms weakened the mechanism designed to trigger necessary restructurings; and UN reform efforts had little concrete impact in either direction.
What explains the variation in these recent regulatory outcomes? I argue that this variation can be understood according to two dimensions: the process-trigger distinction and the legal-institutional design of process-oriented mechanisms. A trigger mechanism is hard to institutionalize because of the time-inconsistent preferences of powerful states and their more general desire鈥攕upported by sovereign debtors and private creditors and amplified by recent experiences鈥攆or case-by-case decision-making when it comes to if and when to trigger a debt restructuring. Compared to the trigger, some but not all process mechanisms have greater odds of success, depending on their design. Hard-law designs face huge political opposition, whereas soft-law tools can encounter political challenges but are also of limited effectiveness in this issue area. By contrast, private-law contracts provide useful mechanisms for navigating the trade-offs of regulating debt restructuring processes, especially for dominant states. I also argue that historical legacies and processes have influenced recent reform outcomes, but mainly through their ability to further enhance or diminish the prospects of mechanisms whose political utility had already been determined by the process-trigger distinction and/or their legal-institutional design.
This thesis makes an empirical contribution to IPE and global governance literatures by providing the first comprehensive analysis of recent sovereign debt restructuring reforms. It makes important theoretical contributions to these literatures by developing an analytical framework for understanding the politics of regulatory reform within the sovereign debt restructuring regime. It also offers insights that contribute to wider debates about institutional design and development, including those related to the choice of international hard-law or soft-law governance instruments, the use of contracts in global governance, and the role of historical legacies and processes in shaping regulatory outcomes
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Identifying and Resolving Inter-creditor and Debtor-creditor Equity Issues in Sovereign Debt Restructuring
Most discussions of inter-creditor issues vis-脿-vis sovereign debt restructuring focus on the collective action problems that lead to individually and collectively suboptimal outcomes. Some studies also highlight, or at least imply, that creditor interests are often relatively aligned with debtor interests, insofar as both groups want to avoid crises and, when they occur, resolve them with minimal disruption. This, of course, is not always the case, in particular when creditor groups are non-homogenous. In many cases, significant conflicts of interest exist and can undermine inter-creditor, as well as debtor-creditor, equity and cooperation during debt restructurings. This policy brief draws on a joint workshop with Columbia University on Frameworks for Sovereign Debt Restructuring, held in New York on November 17, 2014. It narrows in on a specific set of salient issues that affect debt restructuring processes and outcomes: those related to inter-creditor and creditor-debtor equity. It also offers a few policy considerations for beginning to resolve these issues in ways that contribute to fairer and more effective debt restructurings
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Linking removal targets to the ecological effects of invaders: a predictive model and field test
Species invasions have a range of negative effects on recipient ecosystems, and many occur at a scale and magnitude that preclude complete eradication. When complete extirpation is unlikely with available management resources, an effective strategy may be to suppress invasive populations below levels predicted to cause undesirable ecological change. We illustrate this approach by developing and testing targets for the control of invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) on Western Atlantic coral reefs. We first developed a size structured simulation model of predation by lionfish on native fish communities, which we used to predict threshold densities of lionfish beyond which native fish biomass should decline. We then tested our predictions by experimentally manipulating lionfish densities above or below reef-specific thresholds, and monitoring the consequences for native fish populations on 24 Bahamian patch reefs over 18 months. We found that reducing lionfish below predicted threshold densities effectively protected native fish community biomass from predation-induced declines. Reductions in density of 75- 95%, depending on the reef, were required to suppress
lionfish below levels predicted to over-consume prey. On reefs where lionfish were kept threshold densities, native prey fish biomass increased by 50-70%. Gains in small (15cm total length), including ecologically important grazers and economically important fisheries species, had increased by 10-65% by the end of the experiment. Crucially, similar gains in prey fish biomass were realized on reefs subjected to partial and full removal of lionfish, but partial removals took 30% less time to implement. By contrast, the biomass of small native fishes declined by more than 50% on all reefs with lionfish densities exceeding reef-specific thresholds. Large inter-reef variation in the biomass of prey fishes at the outset of the study, which influences the threshold density of lionfish, means that we identify a single rule-of-thumb for guiding control efforts. However, our model provides a method for setting reef-specific targets for population control using local monitoring data. Our work is the first to demonstrate that for ongoing invasions, suppressing invaders below densitiesterms of protecting the native
ecosystem on a local scale, to achieving complete eradicationKeywords: Metabolic scaling theory, Marine management, Eradication, Size-based analysis, Population control, Exotic species, Productivity, Ecological model, PredationKeywords: Metabolic scaling theory, Marine management, Eradication, Size-based analysis, Population control, Exotic species, Productivity, Ecological model, Predatio
Appendix A. A work flow diagram for estimating lionfish density targets from our simulation model, and information on the species and size classes of native reef fishes found on our study reefs in the Bahamas.
A work flow diagram for estimating lionfish density targets from our simulation model, and information on the species and size classes of native reef fishes found on our study reefs in the Bahamas
Miscellany
Student and Faculty Work 2015 Powell Award Winnershttps://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/miscell/1010/thumbnail.jp