IFSWF Report on Compliance with the Santiago Principles: Admirable but Flawed Transparency
Sarah Bagnall and Edwin M. Truman examine the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSWF) report, which claims to be "a solid, initial step toward a better understanding of the IFSWF and of the Santiago Principles," and find this to be largely true, with a few limitations. The report, released July 7, 2011, is a self-assessment of the voluntary compliance of 21 member sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) with the Generally Accepted Principles and Practices of SWFs, issued in October 2008. Bagnall and Truman find that the extent of compliance with the Santiago Principles is somewhat exaggerated. In addition, some of the 21 funds have substantially lower rates of compliance than others, which is not reported. However, the report is frank about many of the issues that arise with respect to the interpretation of its results, for example regarding the application of the principles on investment policies and on nonfinancial restrictions on SWF investment decisions. Ultimately, presentation may obscure some results in the IFSWF report, but Bagnall and Truman find the report credible and admirable.
Transparency , Long-term Investment , and the Political Economy of Sovereign Wealth Funds
Whereas Anglo-American financial institutions dominated the financial history of the twentieth century, the recent and rapid growth in the twenty-first century in the number of sovereign wealth funds (SWF), mostly from outside North America and Western Europe, represents an important structural change to the global economic landscape. If the conventional model of investment by large beneficiary institutions is to hold small passive stakes in firms as part of large diversified portfolios intermediated by asset managers in the leading financial centers, many SWFs seem to be partially rejecting this model for more tightly focused portfolios with larger stakes. Despite a range of securities regulations in the major capital markets that oblige transparency in terms of ownership and control, skepticism remains in political circles of the west regarding the motives underpinning the behavior of SWFs. Some worry SWFs will be used by their sponsoring governments to underwrite mercantilist industrial policies or to control the flow and access to natural resources, as many SWFs work under a shroud of secrecy. This paper evaluates this tension considering the scope of SWF regulation in the context of changing spatial and functional structures of institutional asset management, while providing a conceptual framework for appraising SWF transparency. *University Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol. †Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. E-mail: adam.dixon@bristol.ac.uk. Transparency and Sovereign Wealth Funds
Looking for regional words in late seventeenth-century England: Bishop White Kennett and his glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695) 1
The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent dearth of direct textual evidence which might provide trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical setting of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might contribute to bridging the gaps still existing in the history of lexical provincialisms at the time.