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Crystal Ball (crystal + ball)
Selected AbstractsTransaction Cost Estimation and International Regimes: Of Crystal Balls and Sheriff's PossesINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2004Michael Lipson In the aftermath of the 2003 war in Iraq, there is growing concern over the durability of international institutions and their capacity to withstand international change. Transaction costs are a central factor in theoretical explanations of the conditions under which international institutions will persist or be replaced. Rational institutionalists expect regimes to persist after conditions underlying their creation have changed because of the transaction costs of negotiating a replacement regime. Andrew Moravcsik has recently challenged this view, arguing that such costs are generally low and, in any case, arise from domestic and transnational sources rather than interstate bargaining. Others have argued that transaction costs shape the structure of security institutions. All these approaches assume that states can accurately forecast the transaction costs of maintaining or replacing an international regime. However, as an examination of the replacement of the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) by the Wassenaar Arrangement demonstrates, this assumption is not necessarily warranted. This essay reviews transaction-cost-based theories of international cooperation and proposes that incorporation of a variable concerned with states' capacity to estimate transaction costs would improve our theoretical understanding of institutional persistence and change. Moreover, it considers problems of defining and measuring transaction costs, assesses factors limiting states' accurate estimation of transaction costs, and presents some propositions regarding transaction cost estimation and regime persistence. The essay also examines the implications of inaccurate transaction cost estimation for recent US foreign policy and international order. [source] If I had a crystal ball,ECOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT & RESTORATION, Issue 1 2004Tein McDonald Editor No abstract is available for this article. [source] Medical ethics in the 21st centuryJOURNAL OF INTERNAL MEDICINE, Issue 1 2000M. Parker Abstract. Parker M, Hope T (Institute of Health Sciences, Headington, Oxford, UK). Medical ethics in the 21st century. J Intern Med 2000; 248: 1,6. Objectives. To foresee how medical ethics may develop in the 21st century. Design. We have looked into our crystal ball to see what factors are likely to drive medical ethics over the next few decades. We have given examples of how such factors might affect specific issues. Results. Those factors that we identified as likely to shape the future of medical ethics are: Globalization. Medical ethics is likely to have to grapple increasingly with ethical issues arising from the huge discrepancies in the level of health care available in different countries. Increase in longevity. We predict that there will be, at least amongst the richer nations, a significant increase in life expectancy. This will result in issues of resource allocation becoming increasingly problematic within medicine. Child enhancement. Developments in genetics combined with control of reproduction will make it possible to select our children for a broad range of characteristics. There are optimistic and pessimistic predictions as to how such power will be used. In either case, this area will be an important focus of concern in medical ethics. The biological determination of behaviour. Genetic research will lead to an increasing sense that undesirable behaviour is genetically determined. This will lead to a re-examination of such concepts as criminal responsibility. Therapeutic research and clinical practice. We predict that an increasing amount of clinical practice will be within the setting of clinical trials. The ethics of therapeutic research and clinical practice will need to be brought within a coherent framework. [source] From crystal ball towards cognitive anaesthesiologyACTA ANAESTHESIOLOGICA SCANDINAVICA, Issue 3 2005V. Jäntti First page of article [source] | ||||||||||