In November 1979 the US government froze over $14 billion of Iranian assets in response to the Iranian revolution and the seizure of US hostages. Since then, freezing sovereign assets has become an increasingly frequent and highly effective economic sanction. It has been used against Nicaragua, Libya, Panama, Kuwait and Iraq. This book is a comprehensive study of asset-freezing as an economic sanction and a political weapon. It analyses the international financial, legal and political implications of asset-freezing. It concentrates on the freeze against Iran to discover the initial motivations and mechanisms of asset-freezing. The book examines its political, economic and legal basis: beginning with the US International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977; through the legal implications of the extraterritorial application of the freeze order and the litigation in European courts; and ending with an examination of the political agreement that resolved the Iranian crisis in 1981. It shows how this agreement superseded litigation in the US courts which would have produced judgments far more favourable to Iran. Finally, there is a comparative analysis of freezes after the Iranian case and suggestions for the ways in which countries vulnerable to asset-freezing can protect themselves against this unilateral instrument of hegemony by a major financial power.

This is an odd book. An extensive and sometimes annotated bibliography, it is not a book in the sense of a narrative. However, if treated as a book in the traditional sense it leads the reader through a broad spectrum of feelings of amazement, curiosity and desire: amazement about the sheer volume, richness and detail of theliterature on Batavia/Jakarta; curiosity about the contents of certain publications or series of publications with attractive titles; and a feeling of desire immediately to begin an investigation into one of the appealing subjects stumbled upon while leafing through. The bibliography contains over 5000 titles classified into 42 broad subject categories. The vast majority of the publications consists of books, but the number of articles is also very substantial. Most of these titles (3500) were produced after 1950. The larger part of the publications are written in Indonesian, Dutch, and to a lesser extent English. But also publications in such languages as French, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, and many others were listed. Indexes of authors, of subjects and of titles make this bibliography easily accessible.

How do markets work? This reader introduces the student to the workings of the market, explaining both the reasons for its success and its shortcomings. Throughout, the text encourages a critical approach demonstrating the diversity of market economies. In particular it explores: the social nature of market economies the range of approaches to the study of the market: Marxist, Austrian, Keynesian and institutional economics are discussed as alternatives to the neo-classical mainstream the differences between Anglo-American, European and Asian economic models the historical development of markets globalisation: its extent and its impact the costs and the benefits of markets With chapters by Will Hutton, John Gray and Eric Hobsbawm, this reader provides an excellent introduction.

The book discusses governance, law, and constitutional matters in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. It examines how and why the business world, commercial relations, and company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level.