Cross-border exchange of tax information upon request and fundamental rights – Can the right balance be struck?: Joined cases C-245/19 and C-246/2019, État luxembourgeois contre B EU:C:2020:795

On 6 October 2020, in joined cases C-245/19 and C-246/19, État luxembourgeois contre B, the Court of Justice delivered a landmark ruling about the fundamental right to a judicial remedy against an information order issued by the national tax authorities of a Member State in the application of Directive 2011/16/EU. The Court ruled that the holders of the taxpayer’s information have the right to directly challenge the request to provide information but, differing from the Opinion of Advocate General Kokott, the Court decided that, when other remedies are available, the taxpayer under tax investigation and other third parties concerned do not have the right to direct judicial remedy against the information order. Likewise, the Court clarified how specific and precise the information requested must be in order to admit that the request for information is foreseeably relevant for the taxation of the concerned taxpayer. Following the Berlioz case, the ruling at hand continues to outline the content, scope and limits of fundamental rights in cross-border exchanges of tax information upon request in the European Union. However, this casuistic approach will not necessarily result in the development of a coherent and general framework of protection, which underlines the need for a common minimum standard to enhance the protection of fundamental rights in cross-border situations.

The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions Are Self-Undermining

Scholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested within liberal democracies. In this article, we argue that a key source of debate over the Liberal International Information Order (LIIO), a sub-order of the Liberal International Order (LIO), is generated internally by “self-undermining feedback effects,” that is, mechanisms through which institutional arrangements undermine their own political conditions of survival over time. Empirically, we demonstrate how global governance of the Internet, transnational disinformation campaigns, and domestic information governance interact to sow the seeds of this contention. In particular, illiberal states converted norms of openness into a vector of attack, unsettling political bargains in liberal states concerning the LIIO. More generally, we set out a broader research agenda to show how the international relations discipline might better understand institutional change as well as the informational aspects of the current crisis in the LIO.

Postcolonialism and Technologies of Identification

This chapter challenges traditional diffusionist approaches to the circulation of scientific and technological knowledge, exploring instead the “geographical turn” in science and technology studies through postcolonial philosophy which was developed to understand the movement of technical knowledge between west and east. The late nineteenth-century problem of unique identification of individuals, for civil and legal purposes in colonial India, provides two examples of forensic technologies, fingerprinting and criminalistics, which were developed in a colonial setting and then modified and introduced into western cultures. These examples resonate with Kapil Raj’s research on the circulation of knowledge in eighteenth century South Asia in terms of contact zones, the mutation of knowledge, trust relations in the making of technical knowledge in colonial India, and the maintenance of an efficient administration. Although this chapter focuses on historical examples, there are clear resonances with contemporary biometric identification technologies and their implications for today’s “information order.”

Independent Sources of Information-Theoretic Descriptors of Electronic States

The need for resultant measures of the Information-Theoretic (IT) content of molecular electronic wavefunctions, combining the information contributions due to the probability and phase/current distributions, is reemphasized. Complementary measures of the state entropy (disorder) and information (order) contents are reexamined, the continuities of wavefunction components are summarized, and the probability acceleration concept is used to determine the current and information sources. The experimental elimination of the state uncertainties is discussed and limitations in this information-acquirement process imposed by the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle are commented upon.

The influence of narrative disclosure readability, information ordering and graphical representations on non-professional investors' judgment: evidence from an emerging market

PurposeThis study examines whether manipulation in attributes of corporate narrative disclosures and the use of graphical representations can bias non-professional investors' judgment towards firms' future performance, in an emerging market context.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct three different experiments with a 2 × 2 between-subjects design, using accounting and finance senior undergraduate students to proxy for the non-professional investors.FindingsResults show that simple (more readable) disclosures improve non-professional investors' judgment towards firms' future performance. In addition, it is found that non-professional investors are prone to a recency effect from the intentional ordering of narrative information, when using complex (less readable) narratives. However, no primacy effect is found, when using simple (more readable) disclosures. The results further provide evidence that the inclusion of graphical representations, along with the manipulated narrative disclosures, can moderate the recency effect of information order, when using less readable and complex narrative disclosures.Research limitations/implicationsThe results reveal that although the content of corporate disclosures can be objective, neutral and relevant, manipulation in textual features and the use of graphical presentations, can interact to impact how non-professional investors perceive and process the disclosed information. This study provides an Egyptian evidence regarding this issue, as the majority of prior studies concentrate on developed capital markets. In addition, it contributes to prior studies evaluating the appropriateness of the Belief Adjustment Model predictions about the effect of textual presentation order on decision-making, by providing evidence from an emerging market.Practical implicationsResults attempt to increase the awareness of investors and encourage them to use multiple sources of information to avoid the probable bias that can result from management's manipulation of narratives. In addition, the study could be of interest to regulators and standard-setters, where the results reveal the need for guidelines and regulations to guide the disclosure of narrative information and the use of graphical information in corporate reports.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effect of two impression management strategies in narrative disclosures (readability and information order), along with the use of graphical representations, on non-professional investors' judgment in an emerging market, like Egypt.