This article argues that the trend to zoom into mandatory human rights due diligence (mHRDD) as the sole solution to corporate abuse is misleading. In fact, it might risk missing entirely the main point which, as set out in this article, should be creating economic systems that enable rights-based and rights-driven business models. A small, but growing number of scholarly articles address the economic, fiscal and regulatory institutions needed to create an enabling environment for the fulfilment of human rights. These policy areas constitute what some of us understand as a ‘rights-based economy’ or ‘rights-enabling economies’. State-level efforts would be much more effective in promoting substantive equality if driven by a rights-based approach rather than a market logic. This article contends that while ensuring comprehensive mHRDD is in place as a preventative and mitigation tool, states must also push for transformative macroeconomic policies based on human rights principles as a way to fundamentally change business models.

This article focuses on the manner in which the US identifies the exchange rate and macroeconomic policies of its key trading partners and the policy advice it gives to them, when according to the US set criteria the trading partner's exchange rate and macroeconomic policies contribute to the US trade deficit. The article focuses on the US apparatus that is set in two different pieces of US legislation concerned essentially with currency manipulation mainly from the perspective of the WTO and IMF legal regimes. The paper concludes that although the US regime concerns currency manipulation, and is implemented to address a compliance void under the IMF and WTO procedures, it is flawed and that the Reports prepared under the US legislation are not qualitatively enlightening.

The adoption of a common central Bank has modified the strategic relationships between fiscal and monetary authorities and raised in a new context the issue of debt stabilization. To study this problem, Van Aarle et al (1997) have proposed a two-country model with a common central bank. In a sense they obtained a neutrality result: the adoption of a common central bank does not modify the evolution of debt if the authorities can commit. This note reexamines this neutrality result by departing from the previous authors on three points: i) externalities are introduced between countries to account for the elasticity of the world interest rate to macro-economic policies, ii) the model features n countries, some of them remaining outside the monetary Union, iii) analytical results are given (many results of Van Aarle et al (1997) were numeric). In this extended context the neutrality result collapses: i) the institutional change introduces an asymmetry between countries, ii) countries inside the monetary union improve their long run welfare, iii) but the outside countries can win or lose under the new institutional setting.