This book examines the extent to which, and the ways in which, regulatory barriers to trade in banking services can be liberalized under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The interface between regulation and trade liberalization is one of the foremost issues confronting the multilateral trading system. Although the regulation of services can create impediments to trade, such measures are often not intended to discourage trade but rather to attain other policy objectives. Therefore, in fulfilling the agenda of the GATS to open services markets, WTO Members have to address regulatory impediments to trade without undermining the ability of states to regulate their services sectors. The book explores how the tension between national regulatory autonomy and trade liberalization in banking services can be managed in the context of the multilateral trading system. It recognizes that the reduction of regulatory barriers to trade in banking services under the GATS is a challenging undertaking because of the heavily regulated nature of the sector and the important role of regulation in the industry. The book examines why the banking sector is regulated and how the regulation of banking can impede trade in services, taking into account the regulatory reforms ensuing from the financial crisis. It provides an overview of the framework the GATS provides for the liberalization of trade in banking services and examines the specific commitments that WTO Members have undertaken to open their banking markets, focusing on the commitments of the EU, USA, India, and China. It assesses the existing disciplines in the GATS on discriminatory and non-discriminatory regulation in the banking sector and investigates how the WTO can address regulatory barriers to trade in banking services through additional disciplines on domestic regulation and recognition of prudential measures. The book also examines the extent to which the conclusions drawn with respect to banking services are equally applicable to insurance and securities services.
This is a book about the risks and rewards of home ownership in the 21st century. Using a range of vivid examples, it shows how housing markets work to concentrate wealth into property, how the role of mortgage markets has changed, and how financial markets have failed to manage the credit and investment risks to which home occupiers are exposed. A clear-sighted view of the problems of the housing economy, Safe as Houses? makes complex economic ideas accessible to an interdisciplinary readership. It exposes a kaleidoscope of overlapping markets whose workings tie the meagre budgets of the poorest home-buyers to the massive turnover of the world's largest financial exchanges. Home ownership is a risky business. But in a thought-provoking analysis, Susan Smith argues that the precarious financial position of the average home-occupier may benefit as much from the cautious use of innovative instruments as from the wholesale dismantling of financial capitalism. Interdisciplinary in style, drawing from cultural economy, material sociology, and economic anthropology, as well as from mainstream housing economics, this book provides a clear analysis of the housing market in the current financial crisis, with a practical edge, engaging with policy, practice, and everyday life.
Millions of people worldwide live in poverty. Why is that? What has been done about it in the past? And what is being done about it now? Poverty: A Very Short Introduction explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives—from the circumstances of birth and gender to access to clean water and whether it is wartime or peacetime. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. This VSI looks at the history of poverty, the practical and analytical efforts made to eradicate it, and the prospects for further poverty alleviation in the future.
The first book length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. The author shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally impossible. The result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the New Inequality of our times. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit and John Tomasi, but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, Francois Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty.
When Lee Kuan Yew died recently, the world media turned its attention to the nation he led for decades: Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew's revolutionary transformation of Singapore from a poor and corrupt colonial backwater into an economic powerhouse renowned for its wealth, order, and rectitude is one of the great--and most surprising--stories of modern era. In Singapore: Unlikely Power, John Perry provides an evenhanded and authoritative history of the island nation that ranges from its Malay origins to the present day. Blessed with a natural deepwater port that is shielded by mountain ranges from oceanic storms and which sits along one of the most strategic straits in the world, Singapore has served as a major shipping entrepot throughout modern history. The first great naval power to exploit the island's strategic location was China, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thousands of Chinese emigrated to Singapore. The most famous colonizer, though, was Britain, which ruled Singapore until the 1960s except for when the Japanese occupied it during World War Two. From the early nineteenth century onward, Singapore was a vital node in the global economy, which relied on oceanic shipping and the protection of the British Navy. Perry covers all of this before turning to the era of independence, which began in the 1960s. Plagued with the usual assortment of ills that former colonies in the tropics suffered from--corruption, inequality, lack of an educated population--Singapore improbably vaulted from essentially third-world status into a first world dynamo over the course of three decades. In the process, longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew did many things that other post-colonial leaders shunned. He embraced the colonial past, established close ties with its World War Two tormentor (Japan), and adopted a resolutely pragmatist approach to economic development rather than following any one fashionable ideological program. Today, it is one of the wealthiest and best educated countries in the world, and it is a model regime for states looking to develop rapidly but which are relatively unconcerned with freedom or democracy (although Singapore itself is a democracy). In sum, this is an accessible, comprehensive, and indeed colorful overview of a city-state that has perfected one of the most influential political-economic models in the world.
