Regulating Digital Platform Markets and Unfair Trade Practices under the Japanese Antimonopoly Act
Kazuhiko Fuchikawa

Digital platform businesses are growing rapidly worldwide. Notably, indirect network effects would create a monopoly on markets and non-rivalry of data could limit the price of data and the possibility to access data. The traditional way of regulating a monopoly consumes a huge amount of time and money. Competition authorities are struggling with how to tame the Digital Giants. In the two-sided or multi-sided markets, it should be sought to find a simple and quick method of resolving cases. This article clarifies regulations on vertical restrictions under the unfair trade practices (UTPs) regulations and offers a comparative analysis from the viewpoint of European Union, United States and Japanese laws. In Japan, legal action can be taken at an early stage by issuing a cease and desist order under UTPs regulations. This provides quick and flexible legal enforcement, which is less prone to the false positive. It is best to revolve situations and create consistency in the digital platform market at this early stage.

Silence and Denial in Everyday Life - the Case of Animal Suffering
Deidre Wicks

How can we make sense of the fact that we live in a world where good people co-exist in silence about widespread suffering of animals. How is it that sites of suffering such as laboratories, factory farms, abattoirs and animal transportation are all around us and yet we ‘do not, in a certain sense, know about them’ (Coetzee 1999, p.21). This ‘not knowing’ is one of the most difficult barriers for animal activists who must constantly develop new strategies in an attempt to catch public attention and translate it into action.Recent contributions from the ‘sociology of denial’ have elucidated many of the mechanisms involved in ‘not knowing’ in relation to human atrocities and genocide. In this context, ‘denial’ refers to the maintenance of social worlds in which an undesirable situation is unrecognized, ignored or made to seem normal (Zerubavel 2006). These include different types of denial: personal, official and cultural, as well as the process of normalization whereby suffering becomes invisible through routinization, tolerance, accommodation, collusion and cover up. Denial and normalization reflect both personal and collective states where suffering is not acknowledged (Cohen 2001).

Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers - Mathematics, Technology, and Economics
Alexander Lipton and Adrien Treccani

World Scientific
September 2021
ISBN: 978-981-122-151-4

Today, we face two worlds. Apparently, the first is chaotic. Incensed marauders trashing the US Capitol, Atlantic and Pacific trade spats, online communities attacking hedge funds, inconsistent public health communications, cyberattacks and an economic downturn such as we have not seen for two generations. Quite frankly, it appears incoherent. The second, by contrast, appears more ordered – rapid advances in the applicability of mathematical knowledge and computer science, the so-called data revolution with its army of quants. This second world is a technical world, orderly but beyond the ability of most people to address with any confidence. Both worlds can, however, intimidate.

Review by Edward Price

Do the Quality of Governance, Levels of Human Capital and Financial Development Matter for Foreign Direct Investment Flows to Africa?
Friday Osemenshan Anetor, Ebes Aziegbe-Esho and Grietjie Verhoef

This study investigates the impact of governance, human capital, and financial development on FDI inflows in 49 African countries for the period 2002 to 2018. Employing the Two-step System Generalized Method of Moments (System-GMM) technique, it was found that the quality of governance (i.e., political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption), and human capital (proxied by primary school enrolment and tertiary enrolment) have a significant and positive impact on FDI inflows. The study also found that financial development indicators display a positive impact on FDI inflows. Compared to extant studies, these results suggest that the effects of governance, human capital, and financial development on FDI inflows may depend on the structure and specific constituents of these factors.

On Freedom
Kenneth S. Friedman

The subject of this essay is not freedom of will, often a counterpoint to determinism, but civil, or social freedom: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

The spectral nature of freedom.

A driver is free to exceed the speed limit. Of course, he or she may face a greater risk of a serious accident, and there is some chance of getting a traffic ticket, even having one’s driver’s license revoked. Those would be negative consequences of one’s speeding, of one’s exercising that freedom.

The lure of patrimonialism and rentier capitalism: The fragile equilibrium of liberal-market economies
Marcelo Resico and Stefano Solari

The paper analyses the concept of rentier capitalism and its relevance for the degeneracy of contemporary economies. It analyses the variety of institutional frameworks in which rentier capitalism is embedded and proposes some simplified taxonomy. The notion of rentier capitalism is defined in relation to the phenomenon of patrimonialism. These notions are related to the underlying principles and mechanisms as well as at the different forms of social corruption such as client-patron relationships and patrimonialism. Rentier capitalism is contrasted with an ideal inclusive form of capitalism embedded in a Weberian form of state. It is also referred to different contemporary models of state-economy relationships. Finally, the paper considers the policy dimension dealing with how to limit these undesirable forms of capitalism, pointing at the requirements of a strong and limited state.