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We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

China has achieved continuous economic growth and become more integrated with the global economy since the start of the current financial crisis in late 2008. As the second largest economy in the world, China's political policies, economic and social development have influence on global economy. Attention has been paid worldwide to the current Chinese legal system, political policies and the development of economic reform since China entered the World Trade Organisation in November 2001. The corporate governance reform is the centre of the enterprise reform. In September 1999, The Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party's 15th central Committee identified that corporate governance is the core of the modern enterprise system. In recent years China has made significant progress in developing the foundations of a modern corporate system. There are more than 1,200 companies which have successfully diversified their ownership through public listing and 80% of small and medium size companies have been transformed into non-state-owned enterprises. More and more state-owned enterprises are on the way to transforming into corporations. China has formed a legal framework for corporate governance.

Since the European Union’s (EU) Charter of Fundamental Rights became binding in 2009, data protection has attained the status of a fundamental right (Article 8) throughout the EU. This chapter discusses the relevance of data protection in the context of security. It shows that data protection has been of particular relevance in the German context – not only against the backdrop of rapidly evolving information technology, but also of the historical experiences with political regimes collecting information in order to oppress citizens.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

I discuss the case of Hassan Almrei, one of the five Arab men detained as suspects who have the potential to engage in terrorism. Hassan Almrei's detention arises out of a section of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of Canada that authorizes security certificates. A security certificate permits the detention and expulsion of non-citizens who are considered to be a threat to national security. Detainees have no opportunity to be heard before a certificate is issued and a designated judge of the Federal Court reviews most of the government's case against the detainee in a secret hearing at which neither the detainee nor his counsel is present. The detainee receives only a summary of the evidence against him. I discuss this legal situation as a state of exception that is part of a legal structure in which non-citizens have fewer rights than do citizens. Two conceptual tools shape my understanding of security certificates and their use in the “war on terror”: race thinking and the state of exception. The five detainees are more than simply victims of racial profiling. Their Arab origins, and the life history that mostly Arab Muslim men have had, operate to mark them as individuals likely to commit terrorist acts, people whose propensity for violence is indicated by their origins. When race thinking, the belief in the division of humanity into those prone to violence and those who are not according to racial descent, is accompanied by the idea that there must be two different, hierarchical legal regimes for each, and when we begin to grow accustomed to places without law and to people to whom the rule of law does not apply, we enter the terrifying world of the colonies and the concentration camp. This article examines how a space where law is suspended operates in the “war on terror” and it attends to the work that ideas about race do in the environment of the exception.