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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The purpose of this paper is to survey and analyse the literature emanating from less developed countries (LDCs) and international agencies and dealing with their perception of the needs of LDCs for scientific and technical information (STI) in relation to social and economic development.

The goal of this essay is to examine the conflict resolution activities during political diplomacy as a dynamic and interactive process. In an application of Relational Order Theory (Donohue, 1998), this essay employs a model highlighting the instrumental, relational, and identity‐based issues involved in conflict resolution. To illustrate the utility of this model of Relational Process Management, this essay examines the process of diplomacy leading to the Dayton Accords in the areas of the Former Yugoslavia. For years the international community's efforts at intervention in this conflict were quite meager, as ceasefires and peace plans were brokered and dissolved with some regularity. Ultimately, a final coordinated effort by multiple external parties finally brought the combatants to the table in Dayton, Ohio to negotiate a formal agreement. The complex process by which the parties came to the negotiating table provides a rich case study by which to explore the interactive processes of diplomacy. An examination of the events in this case through the lens of instrumental, relational, and identity‐bound issues culminates with lessons learned from this interactionally‐based analysis of international conflict.

Purpose – Health information exchange (HIE), the process of electronically moving patient-level information between different organizations, is viewed as a solution to the fragmentation of data in health care. This review provides a description of the current state of HIE in seven nations, as well was three international HIE efforts, with a particular focus on the relation of exchange efforts to national health care systems, common challenges, and the implications of cross-border information sharing.

Design/methodology/approach – National and international efforts highlighted in English language informatics journals, professional associations, and government reports are described.

Findings – Fully functioning HIE is not yet a common phenomenon worldwide. However, multiple nations see the potential benefits of HIE and that has led to national and international efforts of varying scope, scale, and purview. National efforts continue to work to overcome the challenges of interoperability, record linking, insufficient infrastructures, governance, and interorganizational relationships, but have created architectural strategies, oversight agencies, and incentives to foster exchange. The three international HIE efforts reviewed represent very different approaches to the same problem of ensuring the availability of health information across borders.

Originality/value – The potential of HIE to address many cost and quality issues will ensure HIE remains on many national agendas. In many instances, health care executives and leaders have opportunities to work within national programs to help shape local exchange governance and decide technology partners. Furthermore, HIE raises policy questions concerning the role of centralized planning, national identifiers, standards, and types of information exchanged, each of which are vital issues to individual health organizations and worthy of their attention.

A study of the price discounts granted by Morton Salt Company and other producers of table salt in the U.S. on their sales of table salt to grocery wholesalers and retailers. The discounts were found to be illegal under the Robinson-Patman Act by the Federal Trade Commission and the Supreme Court. The Commission and the Court believed that the discounts were unjustified price concessions granted to “large” buyers, consistent with the concerns of the Robinson-Patman Act. However, the evidence indicates that the most common discount – the “carload discount” – was received by virtually all buyers, regardless of the buyer’s size; the other discounts – “annual volume” discounts – though received primarily by “large” buyers, were likely cost based. The history of the discounts and likely reasons why they were granted are explored in detail.

The global financial crisis has magnified the role of Financial Sector Surveillance (FSS) in the International Monetary Fund's activities. This chapter surveys the various steps and initiatives through which the Fund has increasingly deepened its involvement in FSS. Overall, this process can be characterised by a preliminary stage and two main phases. The preliminary stage dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s, and was mainly related to the Fund's research and technical assistance activities within the process of monetary and financial deregulation embraced by several member countries. The first ‘official’ phase of the Fund's involvement in FSS started in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis, and relates to the international call to include financial sector issues among the core areas of Fund surveillance. The second phase focuses on the objectives of bringing the coverage of financial sector issues ‘up-to-par’ with the coverage of other traditional core areas of surveillance, and of integrating financial analysis into the Fund's analytical macroeconomic framework. By urging the Fund to give greater attention to its member countries' financial systems, the international community's response to the global crisis may mark the beginning of a new phase of FSS. The Fund's financial sector surveillance, particularly on advanced economies, is of paramount importance for emerging market and developing countries, as they are vulnerable to spillover effects from crises originated in advanced economies. Emerging market and developing economies, which constitute the majority of the Fund's 187 members, are currently the recipients of over 50 programmes of financial support from the Fund (including those of a precautionary nature), totalling over $250 billion.

The purpose of this paper is to explain that the commonly used method allowing for inter-agency cooperation between national financial intelligence units, the memorandum of understanding, is inadequate and ineffective in creating a cooperative global financial intelligence unit capable of combating money laundering typologies on an international scale.

Methods of international financial intelligence unit (FIU) cooperation have chiefly occurred in two ways: first, through the efforts of the Egmont Group; and second, through the inclusion of provisions concerning FIUs contained in international legal documents. The first is an impossibility.

This paper proposes that the result of implementation of the 2012 Financial Action Task Force Recommendations will be an informal network of FIUs where the Egmont group acts as a centralized operator for information exchange, effectively creating an informal global FIU (“GFIU”), but that this system, or a cooperative global financial intelligence unit system based on FIU-to-FIU exchanges will not allow for effective multilateral, international cooperation.

This is because national interests and unfamiliarity with capabilities provided in the Egmont Group’s cooperative platform have and will continue to result in under-utilization of cooperative efforts, and because the traditional mechanism employed for FIU-to-FIU exchanges, the memorandum of understanding (“MOU”), makes uniform or standardized information request and transfer procedures that are required for multilateral or multi-agency efforts to combat money laundering across international boundaries an impossibility.

The Egmont Group’s cooperational structure should be the primary means by which to achieve a GFIU.

The global combat on money laundering will be more effective, thereby more fully protecting the global economy.

A comparison between the Egmont Group’s network building mechanism and the existing use of MoU to create global cooperation against money laundering has not been analyzed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic intelligence oversights with regards to the funding of terrorism.

The paper considers the modus operandi of terrorist financing, and how and how speedily or otherwise they were identified, and the international and national anti‐terrorist financing measure implemented post 9/11.

The paper concludes that there were (and still are) strategic oversights, delays and distractions by government law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies in combating terrorist financing.

The paper suggests there should be more proactive exchange of intelligence by law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies in combating financing of terrorism.

The added value is lessons learned in international efforts against financing of terrorism.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review of international efforts to hold transnational corporations (TNCs) responsible for human rights. It tracks the evolution of international conventions related to TNCs and human rights and assesses their effectiveness.

The paper describes and analyzes efforts over the last four decades by the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, the International Labour Organization and non‐governmental groups to provide guidelines and encourage TNCs to aspire to international standards in human rights.

The early attempts to regulate TNCs internationally lacked any form of the robust compulsion, systemic monitoring and effective enforcement mechanisms necessary to deal with the magnitude of the global investment arena. However, during the last decade, there has been explicit recognition on the part of the UN that action is necessary and the most recent convention emanating from the UN, the Norms, may evolve into a binding instrument on TNCs.

This paper, by mapping the development of global ethical conventions up to the UN Norms on the responsibilities for TNCs and other business enterprises with regards to human rights, informs corporate officers of the state of global discussions on this issue and lays the groundwork for further scholarly analysis of the Norms in the future.