In the Law of Political Economy perspective, private property is the corner stone right. Constitutionally, it amounts to a right of decision-making as a matter of principle towards the object of property. It is a decentralisation of the State’s sovereignty. This feature entitles owners to set rules in connection with the use of their property to which users of their property must submit. This is the origin of the authority relationships within business firms. Within liberal constitutional orders, this strong enabling characteristic of property was originally designed for individuals only. But business corporations, subsequently introduced in the legal system, have found the way to have access to these same rights. Concentrating productive assets, they have in effect concentrated rights of decision-making as a matter if principle. And the global firms (or enterprises) using corporations to structure their activities now make use of their prerogatives in a global legal space in which the Law of Political Economy is unable to reconnect economic and political issues. One way out of this major issue raised by globalisation is to constitutionalise world private governments. Recent court cases addressing climate change demonstrate that this is a viable solution. 1

Foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, especially during the nineteenth century, have attracted less interest from historians than Chinese firms and expatriate merchant houses. However, in this period, MNEs shaped advertising in Shenbao, China’s most vital modern Chinese-language newspaper. Through our examination of the advertisements they placed during the newspaper’s first phase of publication, 1872–1889, we argue that MNEs were more significant to the history of business in China than heretofore recognized. We contend that they influenced Chinese print media advertising by pioneering product differentiation and branding in this newspaper. They did so, we suggest, because this approach to marketing, which differed from those used by most other foreign and Chinese domestic advertisers, provided a competitive advantage to overcome their liability of foreignness, and was facilitated by their global reach in the form of knowledge flows from offshore bases to onshore branches.

Recognizing the importance of multinational telecollaboration and form-focused instruction in computer-assisted language learning teacher education, this article investigates teaching English grammar through a seven-week-long telecollaborative project with 41 pre-service language teachers from the United States (US), Poland, and China. The telecollaboration was a pedagogical intervention in which the US participants taught grammar to their non-native-speaker peers. Specifically, the study aimed to trace pre-service teachers’ grammar instruction techniques applied in the communication-oriented context of online exchanges and responses to this instruction, the grammar forms attended to in the exchanges, and the participants’ evaluations of the usefulness of telecollaboration for teaching and learning grammar. Utilizing data from the participants’ emails and results of a post-project survey, this mixed methods study reveals that (1) the implicit technique of modeling was the most frequently applied; (2) the grammatical forms used in both implicit and explicit teaching reflected the communicative orientation of the exchanges; (3) the levels of uptake (i.e. attempts to follow the models provided in the input), and the forms attended to by the learners, reflected their proficiency levels and linguistic background; and (4) participants reported positive opinions about the value of telecollaboration in grammar instruction and in teacher training. The data thus underscore the benefits of online exchanges in giving prospective teachers hands-on experience with communicative grammar teaching.

Objectives: The internal evaluation studied the development of the European network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA) Project in achieving the general objective of establishing an effective and a sustainable network of health technology assessment (HTA) in Europe.

Methods: The Work Package 3 group was dedicated to this task and performed the work. Information on activities during the project was collected from three sources. First, three yearly cross-sectional studies surveyed the participants’ opinions. Responses were by individuals or by institutions. The last round included surveys to the Steering Committee, the Stakeholder Forum, and the Secretariat. Second, the Work Package Lead Partners were interviewed bi-annually, five times in total, to update the information on the Project's progress. Third, additional information was sought in available documents.

Results: The organizational structure remained stable. The Project succeeded in developing tools aimed at providing common methodology with intent to establish a standard of conducting and reporting HTA and to facilitate greater collaboration among agencies. The participants/agencies expressed their belief in a network and in maintaining local/national autonomy. The Work Package Leaders expressed a strong belief in the solid base of the Project for a future network on which to build, but were aware of the need for funding and governmental support.

Conclusions: Participants and Work Package Leaders have expressed support for a future network that will improve national and international collaboration in HTA based on the experience from the EUnetHTA project.

Nous analysons une politique environnementale menée de façon unilatérale par un Pays Développé, destinée à lutter contre une pollution globale. Dans un cadre de concurrence internationale, nous étudions les conséquences d'une telle politique sur la répartition géographique des activités de production, sur les émissions globales, et sur la recherche de technologie propre de la part des firmes. Nous montrons principalement que des considérations stratégiques amènent les gouvernements à des politiques laxistes. Ce résultat de dumping écologique est robuste au type de concurrence puisque nous l'obtenons aussi bien pour une concurrence en prix que pour une concurrence en quantités.

L'objet de cet article est de proposer un modèle permettant de déterminer le prix de transfert optimal entre deux filiales d'une multinationale qui choisissent de façon décentralisée les quantités (concurrence à la Cournot) ou les prix optimaux (concurrence à la Bertrand) sur les marchés oligopolistiques où elles opèrent. Nous montrons que le prix de transfert qui permet à la multinationale de maximiser ses bénéfices consolidés est fonction de trois effets : (1) un effet « transfert de bénéfice » qui dépend de la comparaison des taux d'impôt entre les deux pays où sont situés les filiales; (2) un « effet stratégique » qui provient de ce qu'un prix de transfert sous évalué (inférieur au coût marginal de production de la filiale exportatrice) peut permettre à la filiale étrangère d'être plus agressive sur son marché; (3) un « effet de rétroaction » qui constitue une force de rappel par rapport aux deuxième effet dans le sens où si les coûts marginaux de production de la filiales exportatrice sont croissants, une augmentation des quantités vendues par la filiale étrangère réduit la production de la filiale exportatrice sur son propre marché (et par là même ses profits). Nous montrons en outre que si les coûts de production ne sont plus identiques, le prix de transfert optimal sera d'autant plus faible dans une concurrence à la Cournot que le coût marginal de production de la filiale exportatrice est lui-même faible. Nous étudions enfin les conditions (fiscales) sous lesquelles la multinationale peut exclure les entreprises concurrentes du marché du bien final quand elle les approvisionne en input intermédiaire.