scholarly journals A perfect symbiosis: Curaçao, the Netherlands and financial offshore services, 1951–2013

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Tijn van Beurden ◽  
Joost Jonker

Analysing Curaçao as an offshore financial centre from its inception to its gradual decline, we find that it originated and evolved in close concert with the demand for such services from Western countries. Dutch banks and multinationals spearheaded the creation of institutions on the island facilitating tax avoidance. In this they were aided and abetted by their government, which firmly supported the Antilles in getting access to bilateral tax treaties, notably the one with the United States. Until the mid 1980s Curaçao flourished, but then found it increasingly difficult to keep a competitive advantage over other offshore centres. Meanwhile the Curaçao connection had enabled the Netherlands to turn itself into a hub for international revenue flows that today still feed both Dutch tax income and specialised financial, legal and accounting services.

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie Kapteyn ◽  
James P Smith ◽  
Arthur van Soest

In contrast to the believed similarity in their health outcomes, workers in different Western countries report very different rates of work disability. Using new data from the United States and the Netherlands, we offer a partial resolution to this paradox. We find that observed differences in reported work disability largely stem from the fact that Dutch respondents have a lower threshold in reporting whether they have a work disability than American respondents. For those who do not suffer from pain, work disability is similar in both countries once thresholds are the same. For respondents with pain, however, a significant difference remains. (JEL J14, J28)


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
John Higley

A society becomes postindustrial when 40 percent of its workforce is employed in bureaucratic and service work, a proportion that increases quite rapidly to 70-75, even 80 percent (cf. Bell 1999, xv). By the 1950s the composition of workforces in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada had reached the 40 percent threshold to postindustrial conditions, and during the succeeding two or three decades virtually all other Western countries, plus Japan, crossed it. Quite unforeseen by nearly all observers at the time, non-elites in the first postindustrial societies began to divide into two loose interest and attitude camps during the 1960s and 1970s. The camps’ boundaries were not contiguous with those of the classes and strata that derived from the agricultural, manual industrial, and non-manual workforce components so prominent during historical socioeconomic development.


Author(s):  
Jesper Ryberg

This chapter takes the step from traditional abstract ethical considerations to the more practical question as to what should be expected if one imagines that treatment in the form of neurointerventions is further developed and were to be implemented within a framework such as the one we know from current criminal justice practice. The discussion in the chapter is based on the widely accepted view among penal theorists, namely, that current penal practice in the United States, and also in many other Western countries, deviates significantly from what is ideally desirable. But if this is the case, what does it mean for the idea of applying neurointerventions within such a practice? This question is examined by reconsidering many of the conclusions that have been drawn in preceding chapters in the light of non-ideal real-life penal practice.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
June Howard

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document