Doomsday postponed?

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Regulatory regionalism and anti-money-laundering governance in Asia

With the intensification of the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF's) worldwide campaign to promote anti-money-laundering regulation since the late 1990s, all Asian states except North Korea have signed up to its rules and have established a regional institution—the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering—to promote and oversee the implementation of FATF's 40 Recommendations in the region. This article analyses the FATF regime, making two key claims. First, anti-money-laundering governance in Asia reflects a broader shift to regulatory regionalism, particularly in economic matters, in that its implementation and functioning depend upon the rescaling of ostensibly domestic agencies to function within a regional governance regime. Second, although this form of regulatory regionalism is established in order to bypass the perceived constraints of national sovereignty and political will, it nevertheless inevitably becomes entangled within the socio-political conflicts that shape the exercise of state power more broadly. Consequently, understanding the outcomes of regulatory regionalism involves identifying how these conflicts shape how far and in what manner global regulations are adopted and implemented within specific territories. This argument is demonstrated by a case study of Myanmar

Money Laundering, Global Financial Instability, and Tax Havens in the Pacific Islands

Pacific Islands offshore financial centers (ofcs) are battling against the danger that international organizations will cut them off from the global financial system. Since 1999 the image of the region’s tax havens has been most shaped by the “horror story” of Nauru—the media’s account of how Nauru has been involved with the Bank of New York and other banks in tens of billions of dollars of Russian money laundering, tax evasion, and illegal capital flight. In the late 1990s left-of-center governments led international organizations toward a much more aggressive attack on offshore financial centers. Soon international organizations began blacklisting offshore centers and threatening sanctions—with Pacific Islands being prominent targets. The advent of the conservative Bush administration in America defused a number of threats to offshore centers from international organizations, as the United States began to object to Europe’s anti–tax haven agenda. While the attacks of 11 September 2001 led international organizations to rebuke offshore centers for helping to finance terrorism, ofc promoters contended that the anti-ofc campaign had been so weakened and qualified since the Bush presidency that it might soon collapse. The future of Pacific Islands offshore centers may rest on the outcome of political struggles in the United States, Europe, and international organizations. Two things are clear: that the dominant media image of a number of Pacific Islands states may continue to be shaped by perceptions of their offshore financial centers (making them targets of moral indignation), and that their international relations may at times be held hostage to the issue of their tax havens

Offshore financial centres and internal developments in the Pacific Islands

This paper provides an overview of how hosting offshore financial centres affects the internal development of Pacific island countries. While offshore financial centres have been attractive development options for many regional ?lites, none has become fully functional and the returns have often disappointed the island politicians who sponsored them. While there is some synergy with up-market tourism, construction, and telecommunications, financial centre development has also increased island countries? contacts with criminals, increased their conflicts with metropolitan states and international organisations, and increased their dependence on unstable financial flows

Book Review : South Pacific Futures: Oceania by Anthony Van Fossen : Reply to book review

It may be a tribute to the importance of South Pacific Futures: Oceania Toward 2050 that Helen Hughes resorts to so many inaccuracies and personal attacks in her attempts to repress it in her review in Pacific Economic Bulletin (20(3):142-44). It is a rare experience to read so many distortions in such a short piec

Integrating the tourism industry: problems and strategies

This paper addresses two interrelated issues in tourism development: horizontal integration within tourism's component sectors and attempts at vertical integration between them. The paper employs a conceptual framework adapted from regulation theory, to assess the dynamics of these processes, particularly in relation to airlines and hotels. Through examining some of the most important examples of both horizontal and vertical integration, it indicates how these have influenced contemporary strategies in the component sectors. The paper goes on to illustrate how trends towards Fordist organization within airlines have conflicted with post-Fordist trends in hotel operations, to undermine attempts at vertical integration across the tourism industry. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Due Diligence and "Reasonable Man," Offshore

In the wake of an international crackdown against preferential tax regimes, Caribbean tax havens and other jurisdictions have adopted "due diligence" procedures to manage financial and reputational risk. Due diligence relies on qualitative forms of evaluation and defers grounded and definitive knowledge claims through continuous peer review. In doing so, it mirrors certain forms of ethnographic practice at a number of levels of scale. This article tracks the shifts in financial regulation from crime to harm and from certainty to scrutiny and reflects on their implications for ethnography-as a limited and open-ended process of evaluation warranted by qualitative forms of judgment. It seeks to complicate our picture of contemporary capitalisms by drawing attention to the nonquantifiable and the ethical that lie "inside" them. Where conventional forms of ethnographic critique might look to expose the political or economic interests behind actions, symbols, or social relationships, this article has a more modest goal: to try to understand the similarity of form between due diligence and anthropology. © 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved

Do Corporate Governance Practices in One Jurisdiction Affect Another One? Lessons from the Panama Papers

To what extent do corporate governance practices in one jurisdiction affect another? In this paper, we look at the way that Hong Kong’s and the Mainland’s corporate governance practices have co-evolved, along with offshore incorporations from both places. Drawing on empirical illustrations of the data using analytical techniques like differential equations and Fourier Spectral Analysis, we find a strong relationship across time between changes in corporate governance practices in both jurisdictions as well as offshore incorporations. Our data also support the idea of a theory-free equilibrium level of corporate governance (determined by market participants’ own behaviour rather than by a theory-laden econometric model). We show that lethargy likely explains the persistence of corporate governance practices in both places, with innovations in one place correlating with innovations in the other. Such work clearly implies that corporate governance improvements in one place can help encourage such improvements in other markets which have not adopted laws aimed at improving corporate governance

Structural inheritance in the North Atlantic

The North Atlantic, extending from the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone to the north Norway-Greenland-Svalbard margins, is regarded as both a classic case of structural inheritance and an exemplar for the Wilson-cycle concept. This paper examines different aspects of structural inheritance in the Circum-North Atlantic region: 1) as a function of rejuvenation from lithospheric to crustal scales, and 2) in terms of sequential rifting and opening of the ocean and its margins, including a series of failed rift systems. We summarise and evaluate the role of fundamental lithospheric structures such as mantle fabric and composition, lower crustal inhomogeneities, orogenic belts, and major strike-slip faults during breakup. We relate these to the development and shaping of the NE Atlantic rifted margins, localisation of magmatism, and microcontinent release. We show that, although inheritance is common on multiple scales, the Wilson Cycle is at best an imperfect model for the Circum-North Atlantic region. Observations from the NE Atlantic suggest depth dependency in inheritance (surface, crust, mantle) with selective rejuvenation depending on time-scales, stress field orientations and thermal regime. Specifically, post-Caledonian reactivation to form the North Atlantic rift systems essentially followed pre-existing orogenic crustal structures, while eventual breakup reflected a change in stress field and exploitation of a deeper-seated, lithospheric-scale shear fabrics. We infer that, although collapse of an orogenic belt and eventual transition to a new ocean does occur, it is by no means inevitable