The abysmal economic performance by African States in the past three decades is attributable to a host of known factors – mismanagement of resources, graft, and bureaucratic corruption (Mauro, 1995); but of all the known culprits that have so far suppressed economic growth, none are more...

The level of economic development and the path taken to sustain such development are invariably deterministic of chosen forms of governance, and the political realities that inform them. The literature on political economy is near unanimity on this claim, especially as it pertains the...

On July 17, 1998, one hundred and twenty countries adopted a treaty in Rome to establish a permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.1 This treaty is the culmination of decades of advocacy by leading human rights advocates around the world to establish an international...

The traditional arena of human rights discourse and practice made little or no allowance for the rapidly growing international phenomenon of bureaucratic corruption.1 In the recent past, states have consistently maintained that bureaucratic corruption, on the basis of the norm of...

The doctrine of nonintervention, a staple of traditional international law, provides that each state should refrain from interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. This prohibition includes not only military intervention, but also, in Hersh Lauterpacht’s formulation, all...

In explaining economic phenomena, economic analysis concentrates on selected influences and fixes the host of other factors under a ceteris paribus clause. This view, which goes back to Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), is developed in the first part of the book. Aggregation is viewed as a particular...

Life annuities provide a guaranteed income for the remainder of the recipient’s lifetime, and therefore, annuitization presents an important option when choosing an adequate investment strategy for the retirement ages. While there are numerous research articles studying annuities from a...

Even 50 years after Modigliani/Miller’s irrelevance theorem, the basic question of how firms choose their capital structure remains unclear. This survey paper aims at summarizing and discussing corresponding recent developments in empirical capital structure research, which, in our view, are...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...

Ein Großteil der Neugründungen in Deutschland ist auf staatliche Förderung von Existenzgründern zurückzuführen. Dieser Anteil hat sich nach Einführung des als „Ich-AG“ bekannten Existenzgründungszuschusses Anfang 2003 stark erhöht. Die Erfolgsfaktorenforschung hat diese Form von...