Whither the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership?
Failures in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round have prompted countries to turn to preferential trade agreements. Every country with a stake in world trade is now negotiating bilateral free trade agreements – with occasional infusions of regional attempts to forge greater trade ties by reducing barriers to trade and investments, e.g. the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Some claims Free Trade Agreements to be second-best alternatives to a dysfunctional multilateral system; others see them through the eyes of Jacob Viner and consider them to be termites of the trading system, diverting trade and causing bureaucratic obstacles to trade through Rules of Origin regulations. Yet regardless the side of the argument, the most outstanding feature of many FTAs is that they do not have impressive effects on growth in trade and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The EU, for instance, considers its FTA with South Korea to be a first-of-a-kind, “deep and comprehensive” bilateral agreement with a medium-sized growth market – and at the time when it was ratified, EU representatives hailed it as an important trade agreement for the European post-crisis recovery. The estimates of the European Commission, however, suggested this FTA to boost GDP in Europe by no more than 0.08 percent.
Systems Approaches to Animal Disease Surveillance and Resource Allocation: Methodological Frameworks for Behavioral Analysis
Rosneft’s offshore partnerships: the re-opening of the Russian petroleum frontier?
During an intense period of only 14 months, from June 2010 to August 2011, six major cooperation agreements between oil companies were announced in Russia. Almost all of these partnerships involved offshore projects, with an international oil company as one of the partners and Rosneft as the other. The agreements were concentrated along Russia's Arctic petroleum frontier, and the three that survived the longest involved oil or gas extraction in the Arctic. This article analyses and compares the contents and contexts of the agreements, to ascertain what they have to tell about access for international companies to Russia's offshore petroleum resources and the influence of competing Russian political actors over the country's petroleum sector. The article argues that the new partnerships did represent an intention to open up the Russian continental shelf, and that the agreements were driven and shaped by a series of needs: to secure foreign capital and competence, to reduce exploration risk, to lobby for a better tax framework, to show the government that necessary action was being taken to launch exploration activities, to improve Rosneft's image abroad, and either to avert or prepare for future privatisation of state companies such as Rosneft.
The Diffusion of Power in Global Governance: International Political Economy Meets Foucault