Is Democracy Necessary for Foreign Direct Investment Inflows in India?

India has developed a positive attitude towards the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows during the last five years and made several changes in the market conditions, enhanced civil rights and liberties to attract more FDI inflows. This study examines the impact of democracy on FDI inflows in India by employing an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. For the said purpose, the study uses the annual data from 1980–2017. The findings demonstrate that the democratic setup does not induce FDI inflows in the short run, but there is a positive and significant impact of democracy in the long run. Furthermore, it confirms that gross national income per capita; trade openness, political rights, and civil liberties are significant and positive determinants of FDI inflows in India. Based on findings, this study recommends that India nurture democratic values, property rights security, and values of civil liberty & freedom to appeal for more foreign investment inflows into India progressively. JEL Codes: D73, C22, F14

Globetrotting adventures in digital data governance and ethics

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings This research paper formulates a framework for managing data ethically – which incorporates data governance – for tourism and hospitality organizations (THOs). The framework encourages THOs, like Airbnb and Booking.com, to move beyond mere compliance and into ethical trust-building among their customer communities. This creates the social license needed to overcome controversial challenges like data breaches, and the invasion of COVID passports and other civil liberty restrictions that impact the travel sector. A privacy framework balancing customer and THO interests rests on four pillars: Compliance, Privacy and ethics, Equitable exchanges of data, and Social license to operate. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Postliberal Politics

The present article consists of key extracts from the recently published Adrian Pabst’s book “Postliberal Politics. The Coming Era of Renewal” (2021). According to the author, stability in the West faces the challenges of left and right populism. And if left populism hasn’t survived the trial by real elections, the right populism is quite successful in removing liberal elites from power. At the same time the strong point of the right populism is the provision of a political program, but its weakness is in the absence of any concepts or political instruments for transitions implementation. But forces, - the ultraliberal left and anti-liberal right, - develop various types of identity politics thus undermining the cultural and civilizational fundamental aspects of the West and the feelings of common goal and common destiny. The author opposes those extremes with postliberalism – non-uniform ideological movement directed at overcoming the contradictions of the deadlocked liberal ideology that is characterized by the rise of both left and right populism. According to Adrian Pabst, postliberalism acknowledges the failure of liberal projects and at the same time the necessity to preserve the most valuable liberal aspects in new form. Liberalism with its multiple trends is not beyond hope and some institutions it created are worth preserving. Still liberal ideology lead to the situation when freedom once alienated from self-restraint and mutual obligations turned into unfreedom. Self-destruction of liberal values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and pluralism demonstrates abnormalities that at once distort liberal principles and show liberal ideology logic. Postliberalism is intended to cut short those defects. In particular, postliberal ideology proceeds from acknowledging that the society is based not on some non-personal social contract between individuals as claimed by the liberals from the times of Hobbes and Locke, but appeared as the result of mutual arrangement between generations. Civil liberty does not man freedom from obligations or freedom for the sake of egoistical interests, but liberty to take care of oneself and others. Personality development based on personal independence should be balanced by common well-being. Equality does not mean uniformity but respect for integral virtue. Individual rights should not be downgraded but should be specific and relative due to their connection with obligations towards other people. Postliberalism in this interpretation endeavors to preserve the best gains of liberal ideology while eliminating the threat of blunt authoritarianism that is always concealed in liberal logic.

如何看待政府在疫病中的干預？自由至上主義的道德困境

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 在「自由至上主義」(Libertarianism)的政治哲學詞典中，「政府干預」(state interference)或「政府父權主義」(state paternalism)基本上是一個貶義詞，因為政府意味著官僚、腐敗、無效率，意味著對公民個體自由的干預和限制。然而，自2020年以來在全球範圍內爆發和流行的新冠疫情，讓一貫反政府干預、堅持「小政府」原則的自由至上派的學者倍受挑戰。 面對疫情的肆虐，許多人認為政府的干預（如封城、鎖國、宵禁、隔離、邊控等措施的實行）是必要的。本文探討自由至上主義的自由觀在疫病中所面臨的道德兩難以及政府應在公共衛生管理中扮演的角色。作者指出，雖然自由至上主義的一些有關自由的理念在現實生活中顯得過於教條和不切實際，但從另一個角度看，當我們一再倒向政府的力量以抗擊疫情之時， 我們更需要自由至上主義對我們的提醒，以防政府利用疫情不斷擴大自身的權力範圍，最終傷害每個人的自由權利。 For Libertarians, state interference or state paternalism has a pejorative meaning given that government often implies bureaucracy, corruption, and inefficiency. However, such a view has faced significant resistance since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. For the sake of public health, many people now believe that we must accept much greater governmental intervention in our lives and that it is morally permissible and necessary to have public policies such as lockdowns, mandatory social distancing, border restrictions, and mandatory vaccination. Is it true that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic”? This paper explores the role of the government and the meaning of individual liberty in the face of the current public health crisis. The author contends that the Libertarian views of civil liberty and self-ownership should be taken more seriously as the government obtains more power and a host of extraordinary interventions are being implemented during the pandemic.

Democracy influences climate change concern

Climate change concern varies widely across countries. In 2019, 80% of Greeks were at least somewhat worried about climate change, compared to 20% of Egyptians. We argue that variation in climate change concern is partially caused by differences in democracy. Civil liberties protect climate communicators from state repression, censorship, and violence. We offer empirical evidence for the causal effect of democracy on climate change concern using data from 611,909 individuals from 118 countries collected between 2007 and 2019. Exploiting variation in civil liberties across countries and time, we find one unit change in the 7-point civil liberty index to influence climate change concern by 2.3 [95% CI: ±1] percentage points. The effect is much stronger in wealthy countries and less educated cohorts. We also present evidence for our causal pathway using qualitative interviews and by modeling the association between democracy, climate protest, media coverage, and climate concern with simultaneous equations.

The impact of civil liberties, global health security, median age and population size on the spread of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of civil liberties, global health security, median age and population size on the spread of COVID-19 across the globe.Design/methodology/approachThis study was done by taking data from 166 different countries from the Economist Intelligence Unit, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, World Bank, Johns Hopkins University and United Nations Population Division (UNPD). After conducting all the necessary standard econometric tests, the study was analyzed using the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression.FindingsThe finding of the study indicated that COVID-19 tests per million people (LTT/PM), Population Size (LPOP), Civil Liberty Index (CLI) are statistically significant and positively affect the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases; on the other hand, the Health Security Index (HSI) negatively affects the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.Practical implicationsIn emergency circumstances, the government ought to have a special responsibility to align civil rights with the protection of public health cautiously. However, measures to restrict civil liberties must be proportionate.Originality/valueBesides other variables, the study included and considered civil liberties as a significant factor to affect the spread of COVID-19, which is a new contribution to the existing body of knowledge in the field.

Spatial Diffusion of Civil Liberty

This paper studies the existence of spatial diffusion of civil liberty among neighboring countries. For that purpose, we first combine different exploratory space-time data analysis approaches to find that this phenomenon is spatially clustered and that a convergence process is at work among the world countries from 1985 to 2010, with a structural change by the end of the Twentieth century mainly due to the appearance of the Internet. Second, we specify a spatial autoregressive panel data model for a sample of 130 countries, for 1985–2000, and 172 countries, for 2000–2010. Results provide evidence for spatial diffusion of civil liberty, though it is not constant along this time span. The spreading rate is 0.34 in the first sub-period. After 2000, it reduces to 0.21; that is, countries only “catch” 21% of the average changes in their neighbors’ civil liberty levels. Additionally, religious culture, urban agglomeration and GDP explain the levels of civil liberties in the world.

Country-level conditions like prosperity, democracy, and regulatory culture predict individual climate change belief

Decades after the scientific community agreed on the existence of human-made climate change, substantial parts of the world’s population remain unaware or unconvinced that human activity is responsible for climate change. Belief in human-made climate change continues to vary strongly within and across different countries. Here I analyse data collected by the Gallop World Poll between 2007 and 2010 on individual attitudes across 143 countries, using a random forest model, to show that country-level conditions like environmental protection, civil liberty, and economic development are highly predictive of individual climate change belief. Individual education and internet access, in contrast, are correlated to climate change awareness, but much less to belief in climate change’s anthropogenic causes. I also identify non-linear pattern in which country-level circumstances relate to individual climate change belief. The local importance of most predictors varies strongly across countries, indicating that each country has its relatively unique set of correlates of climate change belief.

Folly in the Fourth Estate: Editorial Cartoons and Conflicting Values in Global Media Culture

The editorial cartoon is a touchstone for matters of free expression in the journalistic tradition. Since their early inception in the politically charged engravings of 18th-century pictorial satirist William Hogarth to the present day, editorial cartoons have shone forth as signifiers of comic irreverence and mockery in the face of governmental authority and in the more generalized cultural politics of the times. In democratic nations they have been cast as a pillar of the fourth estate. Nevertheless, they—and the cartoonists, critics, commentators, and citizens who champion them—have also long stood out as relatively easy targets for concerns about where the lines of issues such libel, slander, defamation, and especially blasphemy should be drawn. This goes for Western-style democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. In other words, the editorial cartoon stands at a critical nexus of meaning and public judgment. At issue from one vantage is what it means to promote the disclosure of folly as the foolish conduct of public officials and the stupidity of institutions that are thereby worthy as objects of ridicule. From another vantage, there is the matter of what it is to deplore the comicality in journalistic opinion-making that goes too far. To approach editorial cartoons from the standpoints of free expression and press freedoms is to verge on conflicting values of civil liberty in and around the so-called right to offend. This was true in the age of Hogarth. It was true in the days of famed French printmaker and caricaturist Honoré Daumier, who was imprisoned for six months from 1832 until 1833 after portraying Emperor Louis-Philippe in the L Caricature. It is also particularly true today in a global media age wherein editorial cartoons, whether or not they are syndicated by official newspapers, can traverse geographic and other boundaries with relative ease and efficiency. Furthermore, the 21st century has seen numerous cartoon controversies vis-à-vis what many commentators have referred to as “cartoon wars,” leading to everything from high-profile firings of cartoonists (including in the United States) through bans and imprisonments of artists in Middle Eastern countries to the 2015 shootings of cartoon artists at the headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Indeed, if the threshold of the free press is the killed cartoon, the limit point of the freedom of expression is the killed cartoonist. Hence the importance of looking beyond any one editorial cartoon or cartoonist in order to contemplate the comic spirit in certain historical moments so as to discover the social, political, and cultural standards of judgment being applied to the carte blanche of journalism and the comic license of those using graphic caricatures to freely editorialize their takes on the world—or not.