Regulating the global illicit economy: Singapore's role in United States' spatial financial surveillance

Illicit transactions are increasingly integrated to legitimate financial flows between international financial centers (IFCs) and offshore jurisdictions (OJs). The United States (US) is actively engaged in regulating illicit transactions through anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) regulations backed by economic sanctions statutes. In this paper, I show how US sanctions regulatory capacity has developed by scaling out compliance and enforcement functions to state regulators and advanced business services (ABS) intermediaries in Singapore. Scaling out draws on a relational scale framework that locates the multiscalar surveillance of IFCs and OJs' entangled financial networks as an instrument for governing the illicit global economy. At the same time, Singapore's enrolment in US financial surveillance benefits the financial center by strengthening the city-state's regulatory functions. Using cases of high-profile illicit financial activities as well as interviews with regulatory agents in Singapore and to a lesser extent the US, the paper shows how multiscalar compliance and enforcement practices support US′ extra-jurisdictional discipline of rogue actors and jurisdictions while augmenting Singapore's stature as a clean and trusted financial center.     

The political economy of the print media and the decline of corporate investigative journalism in Australia

Newspapers in developed economies are experiencing declining advertising and circulation revenues, closures and cutbacks. Investigative journalism's normative role has been described as scrutinising concentrated power sources in liberal democracies. This article examines investigative reporting by the Australian print media that has exposed corporate wrong-doing from affluent times to the current era of newspapers' financial hardship. Applying two content analyses, the article examines business investigative journalism from selected newspapers and specific categories of the peer-reviewed Walkley Awards. The socialist tradition identifies corporate power above other groups in society, and this article finds in accordance with political-economic theories that mainstream newspapers have become conspicuously absent in their investigative role in detecting and exposing corporate transgressions. I conclude that this failure was most notable prior to and during the Global Financial Crisis, and this has implications for the exercise, and scrutiny, of corporate power in Australia.

发达国家的报纸遭遇了广告和发行的滑坡,还有倒闭和削减。调查性新闻的规范角色被描述为自由民主体制内的监督力量。本文考察了澳大利亚印刷媒体从丰裕时代一直到如今报纸财政艰难岁月,对公司过失所做的调查报道。本文使用了内容分析,从选择的报纸和同行评审的Walkley奖的特定类别对商业调查做了研究。社会主义传统认定公司的权力高于社会其他群体,本文同意政治经济学理论,指出主流报纸在履行揭露公司违法不端的调查职责时,是明显缺席的。笔者的结论是,在全球金融危机之前及之中,这种缺席是再明显不过了。这个结论对于公司力量的运动和监督,或许有参考意义。     

The evolution of international political economy

The 'invisible college' of international political economy (IPE) is a house divided. The field is split between the rationalist species that dominates in the US and a diverse genus of critical scholars. Recent developments in IPE suggest, however, that there is scope to rebuild the invisible college. An increasing awareness of normative questions should make rationalist scholars more receptive to critical work, while critical scholars are discovering an independent identity as they reinvent themselves in the tradition of classical political economy. There is much to gain from a renewed exchange between rationalist and critical scholars, particularly in the context of empirical work, as demonstrated by the vivid politics of the global bioeconomy.     

The political economy of economic reform in North Korea

For over 10 years, North Korea has undergone a severe economic crisis, including food shortages, which has inflicted great suffering upon the North Korean people. Given such dire realities, it is beyond all doubt that the North Korean government should actively carry out comprehensive economic reforms as quickly as possible which aim to transform North Korea's present inefficient socialist planned economic system into a market economic system. Many argue that such reforms would give rise to successful economic growth in North Korea, which could enhance the legitimacy of the North Korean regime. Yet, the North Korean regime has consistently avoided implementing economic reforms, even though it has had a number of opportunities to do so. The July 1st reforms, which were introduced in 2002, have been half-hearted and inconsistently applied. This then raises an important question: Why has the North Korean government avoided adopting comprehensive economic reforms? In other words, what is the crucial barrier that has hindered North Korea's implementation of economic reforms? This article pinpoints North Korea's unique political system—i.e. its monolithic system of political control and policy making which exhibits the highest level of power concentration in one individual among all political systems—as the biggest barrier to economic reforms. No doubt North Korea desperately needs comprehensive economic reforms, in light of its economic crisis and food shortages. Nonetheless, the current North Korean regime has avoided adopting such reforms since they will undermine North Korea's monolithic system. In conclusion, North Korea's monolithic system has been the biggest obstacle to North Korea's economic reforms.     

美国的印第安人新政研究

美国学术界对20世纪30年代印第安人新政的研究可以分为三个阶段。第一个阶段是研究的初期阶段,主要以新政改革参与者和同时代学者为主,多颂扬印第安人新政。第二个阶段是印第安人新政研究的快速发展时期,美国学者开始重新思考和评价这一重大改革举措,对印第安人新政的批评和指责也越来越多。第三个阶段为全面繁荣时期,传统印第安人史学与新兴族裔史学遥相呼应,对印第安人新政的批评与赞扬交织于一起。     

The political economy of socialism: A Marxist social theory

Talmon's treatment of nationalism varies in his different writings. This study will try to characterize his views as expressed in his final work, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Through most of the book Talmon's preference for dealing with the vision of revolution, its prophets and bearers is very conspicuous. Their total devotion to restructuring and refashioning the whole world in accordance with the socialist ideology fascinated Talmon before it provoked him into analyzing it to death. Nationalism, on the other hand, appears at best as a natural feeling of loyalty and at worst as a hateful, aggressive, and racist obsession. One of his outstanding interests in that book is in the internal debate among socialists about nationalism as a value and as a strategy, and in the tremendous prominence of Jews in this process. It is only towards the end of the book that Talmon presents his main thesis, the confrontation between the two totalitarian ideologies, Bolshevism and Fascism as deriving from socialism and nationalism, and embodying two kinds of determinism, economic and biological. Nationalism appears as an irrational phantasy, which had developed throughout the nineteenth century to its pivotal culmination in Nazism. This highly problematic thesis, though brilliantly expressed by captivating metaphors, should I think be explained and revised.