Legitimacy in WTO law and investment arbitration: the role of the contracting parties
International trade and investment law is characterized by two distinct models: the constitutional law model as found in the World Trade Organization (WTO), 1 where the remedy is “the bringing into conformity of the measure”, and the tort law model, where international law standards establish the threshold for delictive behavior, to be remedied by damages. 2 Both models represent rules-based approaches to the peaceful settlement of disputes, replacing power diplomacy. They may be considered as the finest examples of the efficient application of rules of international law. Both subsystems of international law are creations of treaties, which serve to control unreasonable political actors and positively affect regulatory governance even on a domestic level. The development of the former GATT and present WTO law is driven and controlled by the contracting parties, through the adoption of panel reports based on rather precise behavioral rules, which leads to an “authentic” interpretation of such rules by its members. 3 In contrast, standards contained in international investment agreements (IIAs) are the result of a “dilatory formula compromise”, i.e., a formal compromise without agreement on its precise content, due to historical reasons. They have been developed through interpretation by arbitral tribunals and scholarly writings in order to achieve a sufficient level of precision to provide for legal certainty and predictability. However, this occurs without further involvement of the contracting parties, which raises legitimacy issues. 4
Outward FDI does not necessarily cost domestic employment of MNEs at home: Evidence from Japanese MNEs
Whether outward foreign direct investment (FDI) projects boost or shrink domestic employment of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in home countries has long been a subject of debate. On the one hand, when MNEs implement projects abroad, it is often to replace their exports of goods and tradable services with FDI in production abroad to serve foreign markets, which reduces employment at home. 1 On the other hand, MNEs’ foreign operations may enhance production efficiency and global market access, generating greater demand for their final outputs. As a result, MNEs need to hire more employees in several production-related activities that are retained in their home countries to serve the additional foreign customers. 2 Reflecting these countervailing forces, numerous empirical studies have reported mixed and/or inconclusive findings on this subject. 3
WebPresent: a World Wide Web-based telepresentation tool for physicians
In this paper, we present the design architecture and the implementation status of WebPresent - a world wide web based tele-presentation tool. This tool allows a physician to use a conference server workstation and make a presentation of patient cases to a geographically distributed audience. The audience consists of other physicians collaborating on patients' health care management and physicians participating in continuing medical education. These physicians are at several locations with networks of different bandwidth and capabilities connecting them. Audiences also receive the patient case information on different computers ranging form high-end display workstations to laptops with low-resolution displays. WebPresent is a scalable networked multimedia tool which supports the presentation of hypertext, images, audio, video, and a white-board to remote physicians with hospital Intranet access. WebPresent allows the audience to receive customized information. The data received can differ in resolution and bandwidth, depending on the availability of resources such as display resolution and network bandwidth.