Corporate Governance is a subject of great interest to academics, investors, and politicians throughout the world. Corporate governance is associated with the way firms are managed and controlled. Countries have adopted different governance systems to resolve the corporate governance issues. Anglo-Saxon systems differ from European and Japanese systems, and Eastern Europe and China, for instance, experiment with the way private organizations should be governed. Despite the great interest and intense debate, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of various governance systems is still sparse. This book brings together most current contributions from various perspectives and from an international angle. The book is an essential reading for academics, university students, practitioners, investors, politicians, and legislators.

The topic of sovereignty is contentious, and one of enduring interest. In a world of ever increasing economic globalisation, the rise of supranational regulation and the interconnected age of information and communication technology, among many other developments, have challenged the once exclusively held Westphalian model of sovereignty. The distinction between the internal aspect of sovereignty as expressed in terms of ultimate authority in a constitution, and the external aspect involving the relationship between sovereign states has been blurred. This has given rise to contemporary debates that explore the theoretical and practical implications of current challenges to established doctrines. Evidently no book could encompass the entirety of the contemporary debates on sovereignty. This is a book of essays focusing on sovereignty by a team of leading writers contributing domestic, European and international perspectives. The essays have been written at a time of very great testing of the institutional frameworks at every level: domestic, European, international or global. The book illuminates the enduring strength of sovereignty as a foundational concept and the continuing widespread appeal of sovereignty as an idea.

The first collaborative volume to explore popular sovereignty, a pivotal concept in the history of political thought.

This study entitled State sovereignty versus individual human rights is a critical reflection of the relationship between sovereignty and (individual) human rights especially as it related to the Rwandan genocide in which about a million people perished in only 100 days. The fact that Rwanda government conducted a genocide against its citizens and continued to enjoy the benefits of sovereign rights of independent states such as the protection from foreign interference, well knowing that peoples rights were being violated, moved me to question the legitimacy of state sovereignty of an abusive government. The purpose of this study was to find out whether the people s sovereignty has been hijacked from the Rwandans by the state, and misused as a shield to mask violations of individual rights from international scrutiny. And further determine whether state sovereignty was made an excuse for non-intervention to stop the genocide. Therefore, the study set out to accomplish the following objectives; to establish the attitudes of the citizens about their sovereignty and independence in light of the past and present governments; to assess the role of sovereignty and international response to the1994 genocide; to examine the current level of human rights observance in the country; and make recommendations. I employed a qualitative Ex-post facto study design since I was looking at the conditions that had already occurred. In such a case there is no manipulation of conditions i.e. the genocide had already occurred. So the design was deemed appropriate in as far as the descriptions of facts. The study was conducted in Kigali, which was the epicentre of the genocide. Using purposive and simple random sampling techniques, a sample of 100 respondents was selected from a study population of 1000 people comprising civil servants, government officials, church leaders, civil society leaders and locals. Using self-administered questionnaires and interview guide data was collected and responses got, were organized, tabulated, and the frequencies determined. The discussion and analysis of data collected gave the following findings; that sovereignty was not a common right in pre-genocide Rwanda and that the 1962 independence was a Hutu independence rather than Rwandan; it was found out that there was gross misuse of sovereignty by the state government, which culminated in the successive and 1994 genocide; the international community breached the 1948 Geneva Convention obligation; there is considerable observance of human rights by the current government although there are still serious human rights concerns. It was recommended that human rights education be incorporated in the education curriculum at all levels to combat cognitive dissonance among Rwandans. Secondly, that those countries that were concerned in one way or another, should account for the untold suffering that the people went through, and thirdly, that the international community (UN) should be restructured to have new standards for prompt humanitarian intervention and that state sovereignty should cease to be used as justification to shield human right abuse. And finally, it is recommended that a regional Crisis response force be established for prompt deployment to the crisis area as an African initiative. I believe these recommendations are relevant to the UN, AU, and the civilized nations in the quest to protect human rights of all peoples everywhere.

The Palgrave Handbook of Sovereign Wealth Funds provides a comprehensive, detailed analysis of these funds from a multidimensional perspective consisting of 33 chapters divided into seven sections. Section I provides background material about SWFs, providing a foundation for the remainder of the handbook. Section II examines various controversies, governance, and accountability topics involving SWFs. Section III discusses the political, legal, and tax aspects of SWFs. Section IV reviews numerous topics involving SWF management. Section V deals with SWFs' policies, preferences, and performance. Section VI provides descriptive analyses of SWFs based on country or region. It also offers a comparison of SWF similarities and differences across countries. Section VII concludes by examining special issues and the future of SWFs. This handbook spans the gamut from theoretical to practical while offering the right balance of detailed and user-friendly coverage. Discussion of relevant research permeates the handbook. Although other books are available on SWFs, few are as comprehensive or provide a multidimensional perspective from academics and practitioners. This handbook fills a gap by showing how SWFs are a growing and dynamic force in international finance.

In traditional bond markets, sovereign bonds provide benchmarks and serve as catalysts for the corporate bond market development. Contrary to the usual sequence of bond market development, sovereign issuers are latecomers to sustainable bond markets. Yet, our empirical study finds that sovereign green bond issuance can have quantitative and qualitative benefits for the development of private sustainable bond markets. Our results suggest that both the number and the size of corporate green bond issuance increase more in a jurisdiction after the sovereign debut. The results are more pronounced in countries with stronger climate policies. Sovereign green bond issuance also improves the quality of green verification standards in the corporate bond market more generally, consistent with the aim of fostering third-party reviews and promoting best practice in green reporting and verification. Finally, our work provides evidence that the sovereign debut increases liquidity and diminishes yield spreads of corporate green bonds in the same jurisdiction.

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.