Panama and the WTO : new constitutionalism of trade policy and global tax governance

"Corrigendum" in Review of International Political Economy, 24(4), p. 738 (DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1332547).Tax havens and tax flight have lately received increasing attention, while interest toward multilateral trade policies has somewhat diminished. We argue that more attention needs to be paid exactly to the interrelations between trade and tax policies. Drawing from two case studies on Panama's trade disputes, we show how World Trade Organization (WTO) rules can be used both to resist attempts to sanction secrecy structures and to promote measures against tax flight. The theory of new constitutionalism can help to explain how trade treaties can 'lock in' tax policies. However, our case studies show that trade policy not only 'locks in' democratic policy-making, but also enables tax havens to use their commercialized sovereignty to resists anti-secrecy measures. What is being 'locked in' are the policy tools, not necessarily the policies. The changing relationship between trade and tax policies can also create new and unexpected tools for tackling tax evasion, underlining the importance of epistemic arbitrage in the context of new constitutionalism. In principle, political actors with sufficient technical and juridical knowledge can shape global tax governance to various directions regardless of their formal position in the world political hierarchies. This should be taken into account when trade treaties are being negotiated or revised.Peer reviewe

The rise of impact in academia: repackaging a long-standing idea

Since the Research Excellence Framework of 2014 (REF2014) ‘impact’ has created a conceptual conundrum gradually being pieced together by academics across the Higher Education sector. Emerging narratives and counter-narratives focus upon its role in dictating institutional reputation and funding to universities. However, not only does literature exploring impact, rather than ‘REF2014 impact’ per se, seldom see it as part of a changing sector; it often treats it as a new phenomenon within the political and social sciences. Here, drawing on academic perceptions of impact set in motion in the UK during the 1970s, we critique the underlying assumption that impact is new. We argue three key points to this end. Firstly, contrary to much of the literature examining academic perceptions of impact, it is a long-standing idea. Secondly, within such accounts, the effect of academic research on policy and society (which is longstanding) and the instrumentalisation of impact as a funding requirement (which is relatively new) are conflated. Thirdly, this conflation creates a novelty effect. In the context of a wider sea change to Higher Education, we examine different forms of consent, acceptance, endorsement and resistance surrounding the ‘new’ impact agenda to argue that this ‘novelty effect’ masks an important transitory process of acclimatisation among academics