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This article follows the conceptual history of regulation in the Russian and Soviet context from the late 19th to mid-20th century and emphasizes its ecological dimension. Considering that regulation is a fundamentally interdisciplinary concept applied in biology, economics, law, or political science, such a history cannot strictly limit itself to the conceptual use of regulation in ecological theory. Here, ecology is rather generally understood as a scientific knowledge of nature that is being formed in various sciences throughout the 19th and 20th century by reintegrating knowledge generated in such different disciplines as natural history, biology, medicine, physics, or physiology. This paper exemplarily traces the constitutional process of ecology as a science with regard to the concept of regulation by acknowledging the transdisciplinary and sometimes metaphorical use of the concept and its oscillation between the organic and the social, the natural and the artificial, the mechanic and the dynamic, the intrinsic and the extrinsic.
Under Solvency II, corporate governance requirements are a complementary, but nonetheless essential, element to build a sound regulatory framework for insurance undertakings, also to address risks not specifically mitigated by the sole solvency capital requirements. After recalling the provisions of the second pillar concerning the system of governance, the paper is devoted to highlight the emerging regulatory trends in the corporate governance of insurance firms. Among others, it signals the exceptional extension of the duties and responsibilities assigned to the Board of directors, far beyond the traditional role of both monitoring the chief executive officer, and assessing the overall direction and strategy of the business. However, a better risk governance is not necessarily built on narrow rule-based approaches to corporate governance.
Despite a lot of re-structuring and many innovations in recent years, the securities transaction industry in the European Union is still a highly inefficient and inconsistently configured system for cross-border transactions. This paper analyzes the functions performed, the institutions involved and the parameters concerned that shape market and ownership structure in the industry. Of particular interest are microeconomic incentives of the main players that can be in contradiction to social welfare. We develop a framework and analyze three consistent systems for the securities transaction industry in the EU that offer superior efficiency than the current, inefficient arrangement. Some policy advice is given to select the 'best' system for the Single European Financial Market.
This paper examines empirically the question whether the presence of foreign banks and a liberal trade regime with regard to financial services can contribute to a stabilization of capital flows to emerging markets. Since foreign banks, so the argument goes, provide better information to foreign investors and increase transparency, the danger of herding is reduced. Previous findings by Kono and Schuknecht (1998) confirmed empirically that such an effect does exist. This study expands their data set with respect to the length of the time period and the number of countries. Contrary to Kono and Schuknecht, it is found that foreign bank penetration tends to rather increase the volatility of capital flows. The trade regime variables are not significant in explaining cross-country variations in the volatility of capital flows. This result does not change significantly when alternative measures of volatility are considered. This paper was presented at the conference ''Financial crisis in transition countries: recent lessons and problems yet to solve'' on 13-14 July 2000 at the Institute for Economic Research (IWH) in Halle, Germany.
In international accounting literature there are various approaches to assess the quality of national accounting systems with respect to specific key functions, e.g. the intensity of capital market information. An empirical approach often used measures the quality of disclosure by ranking the national systems with the so-called "disclosure index" (e.g. Choi 1973, Barret 1975, Cooke 1992, Taylor/ Zarzeski 1996). Concentrating on disclosure regulation in contrast to accounting practices, Cooke/ Wallace 1990 construct an index which measures the "degree of financial regulation". They identify groups of countries which can be clearly classified in highly regulated, regulated and moderately regulated national accounting systems.
In our analysis, we want to enrich the idea of the degree of financial disclosure regulation to a concept for evaluating the degree of determination of financial measurement. Assuming that a high degree of determination of a national accounting system leads to more comparable accounts than a low degree, the index can be interpreted as a quality measure of national accounting systems according to the intensity of capital market information. The following hypothesis is to be proved: the degree of disclosure regulation equals the degree of measurement regulation in order to serve the information needs of the national capital markets.
Three groups of different degrees of determination for national accounting systems can be easily identified which are compared to the results of Cooke/ Wallace. For some of the national systems the above hypothesis seems to be appropriate whereas some opposing results can be shown. Possible explanations are presented which can be causally related to these diverging results. They are based on historical developments, the differentiation between rules for individual and group accounts, and on conditions where different degrees seem plausible.