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This study aims to examine the role of Australian casinos in facilitating money laundering and Chinese capital flight.

The reports and transcripts of evidence from government inquiries into money laundering in Australian casinos are integrated with analyses of Asian transnational crime.

Money laundering in Australian casinos is linked to transnational crime and Chinese capital flight. A central finding is that junket operators play a key role in facilitating money laundering. The casinos are particularly exposed to criminal influences in the Chinese very important person gambling market, since they have used junket operators and underground banks, many of whom are closely linked to major Chinese criminal groups from Hong Kong and Macau.

Very little information is available on money laundering in Australian casinos and this research has relied on the government inquiries that have been conducted over the past two years on the subject.

The author’s focus on money laundering in Australian casinos in the context of Asia-Pacific transnational crime is important for Federal and state government regulators grappling with the rapidly changing money laundering issues. The government inquiries recognised that the money laundering was related to transnational crime, but did not have the time and resources to explore the topic. The paper provides state government casino regulators and financial crime regulators with a broader international perspective to anticipate future money laundering and crime pressures facing Australia’s casinos.

Money laundering in Australian casinos has had devastating social implications on the community. My research helps to focus attention on the problems of transnational crime and money laundering.

Little research has examined the linkages between casinos and transnational crime. This study has found that Australian casinos were used to launder the proceeds of illegal drug trafficking and to facilitate Chinese capital flight. While casinos have been forced by damming government inquiries to tighten anti-money laundering controls, it is likely that there will be pressure to relax these controls in the future because of competitive pressure from other casinos in the Asia-Pacific region.

Money laundering continues to emerge as a transnational phenomenon that has harmful consequences for the global economy and society. Despite the theoretical and practical magnitude of money laundering, international business (IB) research on the topic is scarce and scattered across multiple disciplines. Accordingly, this study aims to advance an integrated understanding of money laundering from the IB perspective.

The authors conduct a systematic review of relevant literature and qualitatively analyze the content of 57 studies published on the topic during the past two decades.

The authors identify five streams (5Cs) of research on money laundering in the IB context: the concept, characteristics, causes, consequences and controls. The analysis further indicates six theoretical approaches used in the past research. Notably, normative standards and business and economics theories are dominant in the extant research.

The authors review the literature on an under-researched but practically significant phenomenon and found potential for advancing its theoretical foundations. Hence, the authors propose a 5Cs framework and a future agenda for research and practice by introducing 21 future research questions and two plausible theories to help study the phenomenon more effectively in the future.

In practical terms, the study extends the understanding of the money laundering phenomenon and subsequently helps mitigating the problem of money laundering in the IB environment, along with its harmful economic and societal impacts.

The authors offer an integrative view on money laundering in the IB context. Additionally, the authors emphasize wider discussions on money laundering as a form of mega-corruption.

This study aims to investigate the decline of American hegemony as one of the most prominent crises of the modern world order, from a broader perspective that transcends narrow traditional interpretations. The paper assumes that the September 11 events in 2001 have launched the actual decline in American hegemony. Tracing the evolution of US global strategy over the past two decades, the study seeks to analyze the main causes and repercussions of the decline of US hegemony, which would provide a bird’s eye view of what the current global system is going through.

The study investigates the decline in American hegemony through a longitudinal within-case analysis which focuses on the causal path of decline in hegemony in the case of the USA, since the events of September 11, 2001, and tries to identify the causal mechanisms behind this decline. Following George and Bennet (2005), the study uses process tracing to examine its research question. Process-tracing method seeks to identify the intervening causal process – causal chain or causal mechanisms or the steps in a causal process – that leads to the outcome of a particular case in a specific historical context (Mahoney, 2000; Bennet and Elman, 2006). The study chose this method, as it offers more potential for identifying causal mechanisms and theory testing (George and Bennet, 2005); it opted for a specific procedure, among the variety of process-tracing procedures listed by George and Bennet, which is the detailed narrative presented as a chronicle, accompanied by explicit causal hypotheses. Using this process tracing procedure, the study assumes that American hegemony has witnessed dramatic changes in the aftermath of critical junctures, particularly the events of September 11, 2001, and the financial crises, 2008, which contributed significantly to this decline. Consequently, it traces the impact of these events on the state of American hegemony, in light of the review of contributions of different theories on hegemony in the field of international relations, both traditional and critical. Consequently, introducing the theoretical framework used in the study (the four-dimensional model of hegemony), which transcends criticisms of previous theories.

The crises of the modern world order and the decline of American hegemony – being the main manifestation of such crises – revealed the inability of the traditional and critical approaches reviewed in the study to interpret this decline and those crises. The reason behind that was the inability of these interpretations to reflect the various dimensions of American hegemony and its decline since the September 11 events. This highlights the importance of using the four-dimensional model, which combines different factors in the analysis and has proved to be an appropriate model for studying the case of American hegemony and its decline after the events of September 11, as it deals with the phenomenon of hegemony as a social relationship based on specific social networks.

Despite the currency and relevance of the decline of US hegemony for both the academic and political world, the topic needed to be analyzed systemically and addressed in a thorough scientific way. Through the application of theoretical concepts into the analysis of empirical data, this study contributes to a field where too often the discourse about decline of American hegemony is led without the required theoretical or conceptual considerations.

There exist long-term fluctuations in the process of capital accumulation. The economic long wave is an essential part of research into non-mainstream western economics. After the Second World War, the capitalist world experienced the fourth long wave of expansion and then entered into a downward phase of the long wave in the 1970s. Regarding to whether a new long wave of expansion took place in the 1980s, left-wing scholars hold different viewpoints. The purpose of this paper is to focus on this issue.

First, based on the review of the long wave history, this paper discusses three kinds of long wave theories with significant influence and puts forward the theoretical framework of analyzing the long wave of capitalist economy. Next, under the guidance of this theoretical framework and in combination with the actual development and evolution of the capitalist economy, the issue of whether the fifth long wave of the capitalist economy began to emerge in the 1980s is discussed deeply.

This paper argues that, from the early 1980s to 2007, the US-dominated developed countries experienced a new long wave of expansion driven by the information technology revolution, the adjustment of the neoliberalism system and the economic globalization. However, the financial-economic crisis of 2008–2009 led to a new phase of long wave downswing.

This paper does not agree with the single-factor analysis of the intrinsic formation mechanism of economic long wave and sticks to the multi-factor analysis centering on the fluctuation of accumulation rate. It is pointed out that the evolution of the long wave of capitalist economy depends on the combined influence of technology, institutions and market. The study of the long wave of the economy will help us to correctly understand the historical stage and characteristics of the current world capitalist economy in the long-term fluctuations, so that we can make an appropriate and positive response.

To realise the shared development of the digital economy, people need to transcend the capital logic and advocate the logic of cooperative development, i.e. “co-construction, benefit-sharing and co-governance”. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned statement.

Platform economy is a new economic form produced by the transformation of the social production patterns in the era of digital capitalism. In the neo-imperialist stage, a new stage of capitalist development, capital logic promotes the global expansion of the platform economy and influences its development process, organisational form, contradictions and dilemmas and internal transcendence. Having the spatiotemporal chain of capital circulation repaired, the globalisation of the platform economy is reshaping how the means of production are combined with labour, affecting the local changes in the general relations of production and “international relations of production”.

In the accumulation of digital capitalism, the social contradictions and fundamental contradictions in the capitalist world have been further intensified, making exploitation, income distribution gap, monopoly and other problems increasingly severe. The imbalance and inequality in the global development of the digital economy are increasingly prominent.

Regarding the global governance of the digital economy, China, as a major responsible country, will strive to encourage all countries to co-build a community with a shared future in cyberspace. In the new international development pattern of digital economy globalisation, China must take effective measures to actively safeguard its national security and development interests to meet specific challenges.

Trade relations between China and the USA have been marked by conflict, especially since China’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO). These conflicts have been analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including the loss of jobs in the USA due to Chinese imports, competition in high technology sectors and the balance of trade. Conceptual frameworks have employed models of domestic differences as well as models of international power distribution. Among domestic differences examined are the existence of state-owned enterprises in China compared to the domination of the USA economy by private firms, the large role of the Communist Party in China and the influence of labor and environmental and labor groups in the USA. Power distribution theories focus on the systemic effects of the distribution of power on trade openness and on the pattern of intra-bloc versus between-bloc trade. This paper aims to examine the role of macroeconomic policy factors in China and the USA, in particular, the role of national patterns of savings, investment and consumption (both private and government). The paper concludes that insofar as the balance of trade is an important component of the trade conflict, domestic macroeconomic factors continue to be important. The resolution of the conflict will have to take into account the respective macroeconomic policies of China and the USA.

The design is an analytic case study of US–China trade relations with a particular focus on the balance of trade. The conceptual framework employed involves an analysis of macroeconomic policy categories, especially the overall pattern of savings (household, firm and government), investment and consumption. Process tracing over time since China's membership in the WTO is carried out with an eye toward the relationship between the balance of trade and macroeconomic policy.

The main findings are that there is a strong relation between the respective macroeconomic policies of the USA and China and their trade relations. The domestic political economy of the USA encourages consumption and a low rate of savings. The opposite is true of China where household income is low by design and national savings are high. China depends on the USA to consume what is not consumed domestically. The USA depends on Chinese imports for additional consumption encouraged by its low rate of savings. The two economies are locked in a mutual dependence.

Key research implications are that there should be more focus on domestic macroeconomic policies since these are the root causes of the trade imbalance. This is not to say that trade frictions centering on jobs, subsidies and competition in high technology are unimportant. However, without the resolution of differences in the management of macroeconomic policies, trade conflicts between the USA and China will continue.

Practical implications are huge, in some ways much more important than the academic implications. Macroeconomic policy differences in savings, investment, government spending, taxation and infrastructure are important. Furthermore, there are available tools in both China and the USA to manage the macroeconomy, particularly, monetary and fiscal policy.

One implication of this paper is that satisfaction or dissatisfaction of workers is dependent on income distribution which in turn affects trade. Treatment of people in different socioeconomic categories, such as the elderly, the young, and those at working age are a function of macroeconomic policies.

Many people have written about macroeconomics. It is a conventional subfield of economics. The originality of this paper lies in its advocacy of a shift of focus and attention and in the argument that traditional macroeconomics is related to trade. Despite its importance, macroeconomics has not been the center of attention for most political scientists, though economists have made it more central.

Gender competence as part of engineering education can better prepare men and women to work on sustainable solutions that benefit entire societies. This chapter describes the framework and lessons learned of a community of practice (CoP) for gender equality facilitated by the Mediterranean Engineering Schools Network. Faculty and students from Mediterranean European, North African and Middle Eastern countries came together in this CoP, which was supported by the TARGET project, to develop a practical plan using a reflexive approach. The transfer of knowledge between generations is achieved by using participatory learning processes, facilitating mindful awareness, widening experiences, deepening understandings and building a gender-sensitive mindset. Students embarked on the journey to become change agents. The process led to the consolidation of gender equality knowledge, competence building and the development of change agents for gender equality. This CoP can inspire other institutions to undertake a participatory path towards gender equality – at local, regional, or global level.

This paper describes the parent–child relationships of upper-middle-class Chinese parents and their adolescent children who were “parachuted” to the United States for private high schools. With parents remaining in China and children in the United States, thousands of miles away, such a transnational educational arrangement complicates the already volatile parent–child relationships during the adolescent years. Through ethnographic interviews of 41 students and 33 parents, I demonstrate different forms of child–parent relationships in a transnational education setting: those who found that the further physical and temporal distance has brought the parent–child relationship closer through frequent communications, children who experienced “accelerated growth” yet questioned the necessity, and delicate parent–child relationships due to increasing transnational cross-cultural or intergenerational differences. These types of parent–child relationships are not comprehensive of all the lived experiences of the “parachute generation,” yet they shed new light on transnational education and the unintended emotional dimensions of educational migration. In a transnational context for an economically well-off group, parental absence or separation of children and parents is no longer a clear-cut concept and has different layers of meanings, taking into account the frequency of communication, duration of spring and winter breaks and the existence of third-party agents such as for-profit intermediaries (or educational consultants) and host families. The diverse patterns of parent–child relations reveal the heterogeneity and complexities of “doing family” across geographic spaces and global educational hierarchies, as well as the roles of communication technologies, the tempo of mobilities and educational intermediaries.