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Many U.S. companies fear investing in Third World countries because of the political risk associated with such ventures. Recent events in Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines and others have under scored such concerns, making U.S. businesses reluctant to participate in some of the fastest growing markets in the Third World. Such political risks need not be so worrisome ‐ many U.S. business people remain unaware of how the Overseas Private Investment Corporation can substantially reduce risks by insuring companies against such uncertainties. This paper discusses the ways through which OPIC can alleviate political risk and compares OPIC’s insurance with the programs of private political risk insurers.

A widely used strategy to cope with the dangers of foreign investment by hedging against potential losses is political risk insurance. All multinational corporations are subject to political risk perils. Political risk is defined as the adverse effect on the value of a business arising out of direct or indirect actions by a foreign government. Broadly speaking, there are six different types of political risk: confiscation, expropriation and nationalization; contract repudiation and frustration; unfair regulatory environment; currency inconvertibility; contingency; and war risk. Similarly, policies available can be defined according to these six categories. In summary, political risk insurance addresses losses which occur because of politically motivated decisions.

This paper describes the experiences and the contentious issues on eight existing PPAs in Nepal with varying type of investment, the key areas where IPPs are treated fairly and the areas where IPPs are discriminated against by the clauses are highlighted. Power Purchase Agreements on IPPs in Nepal are of three types: with foreign investment, local investment and investment in JV with the Utility. A critical issue in designing power purchase agreements is to create a level playing field for the players to secure successful and sustainable IPPs and PPAs. To create this environment, discriminatory clauses or unequal treatment to IPPs in the key issues of the PPAs should be avoided; the key issues being power purchase guarantees, force majeure guarantees, financial and foreign exchange guarantees, operation guarantees, and guarantees concerning insurance and dispute resolution. The analysis shows that discriminatory clauses and unequal treatment are present in the key issues of the agreements.

This article explores how legal intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change. We suggest the increasing complexity and ambiguity of legal rules coupled with the shift from government to governance provide legal intermediaries greater opportunities to influence law and social change. Drawing from new institutional sociology, we suggest rule-intermediaries shape legal and social change, with varying degrees of success, in two ways: (1) law is filtered through non-legal logics emanating from various organizational fields and (2) law is professionalized by non-legal professionals. We draw from case studies in the United States and France to show how intermediaries facilitate or inhibit social change.

The purpose of this study is to identify and to assess specific political risks associated with Indonesia's public private partnership (PPP) power projects and their generally available mitigating measures, based on the perception of the main stakeholders (government, investors, lenders and insurers).

The approach taken is: a comprehensive literature review to identify an initial list of specific political risks associated with Indonesia's PPP power projects and generally available mitigating measures for these risks; unstructured interviews and discussions to gather recent issues related to the study and to filter the risks and project measures identified at previous step; and finally a survey conducted with questionnaires in order to evaluate the risks and their allocation, to suggest corresponding mitigating measures.

The study identified that the political risk perception for Indonesian power projects is still relatively high, due to its legal and regulatory risk and breach of contract risk. Viable government support is also desired by most of the players instead of having political risk insurance as the risk mitigation strategy.

The study has identified a political risk mitigation strategy for infrastructure investment in the Indonesian power sector. Based on that, this study contributes as a scientific exercise in measuring the political risks perception of all stakeholders, which can be useful for all involved parties to mitigate this type of risk successfully.

Due to climate change and an increasing concentration of the world’s population in vulnerable areas, how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly is still a universal dilemma.

This paper applies a law and economic approach.

China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risk is in many ways unique. It emphasizes government responsibilities and works well in many respects, especially in disaster emergency relief. Nonetheless, China’s mechanism which has the vestige of a centrally planned economy needs reform.

I propose a catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework which marries the merits of both the market and government to manage catastrophe risks. There are three pillars of the framework: (i) sustaining a strong and capable government; (ii) government enhancement of the market, neither supplanting nor retarding it; (iii) legalizing the relationship between government and market to prevent government from undermining well-functioning market operations. A catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework may provide insights for developing catastrophe insurance in China and other transitional nations.

First, this paper analyzes China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risks and China’s approach which emphasizes government responsibilities will shed light on solving how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly. Second, this paper starts a broader discussion about government stimulation of developing catastrophe insurance and this framework can stimulate attention to solve the universal dilemma.

The World Bank established the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) in 1985 as the first truly global agency which insures foreign investments against political risks. MIGA is now in its fifth full year of operations and has been more successful than originally forecast. This paper will discuss the formation of MIGA and includes an analysis of its operations to date. When appropriate, comparisons will be made between MIGA operations and those of the U.S. investment insurance agency, OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Company, as well as private market insurers. Selected cases of MIGA guarantees are discussed in the paper.

This study aims to investigate the institutional changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic on the Bahraini insurance sector. This study also examines how those changes affected the risk management practices.

This study deploys a qualitative methodology with a case study design. The data are collected from multiple sources such as semi-structured interviews, documents and website analyses.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an institutional change in the Bahraini insurance sector. Pre-COVID-19, the professional logic was the dominant institutional logic. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic and its related uncertainties made the economic logic the most dominant logic. Accordingly, risk officers are currently responding to the crisis by being more risk-averse than risk managers. This study presents an inclusive institutional understanding of risk management as informed by the professional logic and socio-political and economic logics.

This study has implications for regulators and insurance customers by giving a snapshot of how insurers’ risk officers respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which can help envisage their plans and actions.

This study contributes to risk management and institutional logics literature by illustrating how changes in risk management practices in emerging markets are an operational manifestation of sustaining profits and maintaining the positions of risk officers. This extends the risk management literature by bringing early evidence from an emerging market regarding risk officers’ behaviours and control plans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this study extends the institutional logics literature by exploring the micro-level impacts of logics in an emerging insurance market.

The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the structure of the federal crop insurance program and test whether participating private insurers screen insurance buyers better than the federal agency.

This paper regresses the claim payout on the risk share of private insurers in insurance pools and other relevant variables. The claim payout should be negatively related with the private insurers’ risk share if private insurers screen insurance buyers better than the federal agency.

The payout rates are significantly lower for reinsurance funds with higher risk shares of AIPs, and the relationship between the two variables is not affected much by the aggregate yield (similar relationship in good crop years and bad crop years).

The federal government could improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the crop insurance program by restructuring its delivery system.

The novel contributions of this paper include estimating the economic significance of private insurers’ screening advantage and showing that the economic significance is similar in good crop years and bad crop years.

The precise relationships between neoliberalization, financialization, and rising risk are still being debated in the literature. This paper examines, and challenges, the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) developed by Hyman Minsky and his adherents. In this perspective, the level of financial risk builds over time as participants orient their behavior in relation to assessments of past levels of risk performance, leading them to overly optimistic valuation estimates and increasingly risky behavior with each subsequent cycle. However, there are problems with this approach, and many questions remain, including how participants modify their exposure to risk over time, how risk is scaled, and who benefits from changes in exposure to risk. This paper examines such questions and proposes an alternate perspective on financial instability and risk, in light of the history of risk management within Canada’s housing finance sector. The rise of financialization in Canada has been accompanied by shifts in the sectoral and scalar locus of risk within the housing sector, from the federal state, to lower levels of government, third-sector organizations, and finally, private households. In each case, the transfer of risk has occurred as participants in each stage sought to reduce their own risk exposure in light of realistic and even pessimistic (not optimistic) expectations deriving from past exposure, contradicting basic assumptions of Minsky’s FIH. This is the process that has driven the neoliberalization of housing finance in Canada, characterized by the socialization of lender risk while households increasingly take on the financial and social risks relating to shelter.