Three themes permeate most discussions of Australia’s relationship with Europe. The first is that relations are marked by extreme asymmetry. On one side there stands a large and economically powerful group of states, increasingly organised within the European Union (EU); on the other, a middling power that belongs to no regional bloc and possesses limited international clout. The second is that Australia’s relations with Europe are largely driven by trade issues, especially issues in the agricultural sector. And the third is that Australia’s close bilateral links with Britain are still a central feature of its European policy.

The 2007 – 2008 financial crisis has been the subject of many articles, books, movies and even a theater play. We take you for a walk along Wall Street, pointing at some aspects of the story that touch our personal experiences and interests. We look critically at some of the main underlying causes. Besides political blindness, we highlight the unbridled growth of power of relatively small groups of investment bankers and how these brought financial institutions to (and in some cases beyond) the edge of bankruptcy. We expose some of the over-complicated financial instruments together with their astronomical volumes traded. We also look more critically at the role played by quants (financial engineers) in general and mathematicians in particular. What is the truth behind “The formula that killed Wall Street”? An important aspect concerns early warnings not heeded to. In summary, this is a chapter on greed, power, complexity, volume and stupidity.

Energy supply security has been a crucial energy policy issue for CEE countries at least since the natural gas supply disruptions of 2006 and 2009. This book argues that energy security plays a generally more important role within the CEE region than issues related to climate change. However, this chapter evaluates the interplay between ideas, institutions and the material nature of energy systems in the development of energy policy. In doing so it also highlights the social construction of energy security, demonstrating that energy security is not self-evident or correlated within the CEE region with dependency on energy imports from Russia. Individual CEE countries perceive energy supplies as a security issue to a different extent, identifying the source and extent of insecurity or risk differently, and supporting different policy responses as a result. While some countries, for example, Hungary or Bulgaria, have tended to perceive Russian energy as a means to guarantee energy security, others – most notably, Lithuania and Poland – consider energy security to be one of their main policy issues and imports of Russian energy as one of the main threats to this.

This chapter focuses on the impact of CEE countries on the development of climate and energy policies at the EU level. It is argued that states in the region demonstrate some shared preferences and utilise regional groupings to promote these at the EU level. The chapter discusses the contribution of CEE countries to the development of EU policy – such as Polish efforts to create an ‘Energy NATO’, CEE countries’ efforts to improve energy security following the 2006 and 2009 gas crises, the 2014 Energy Union, and the reaction to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The chapter argues that the security dimension was given priority by CEE countries at the EU level. They contributed to placing energy security on the EU’s agenda during accession negotiations and the immediate post-accession period; however, their preferences were often not shared by older members. It was the 2006 and 2009 gas supply disruptions that shifted the focus towards energy security in the region, and at the EU level. In 2022 the EU’s dependency on and vulnerability to high levels of energy imports from Russia were brought into sharp focus.

ERISA strictly regulates fiduciaries. While ERISA’s fiduciary rules were abstracted from state trust law, several important departures exist. Congress adopted a broad functional definition of fiduciary so that all decision makers – not just asset managers (traditional trustees) – can be held accountable. Importantly, however, decisions by employers respecting the design, establishment, or modification of an employee benefit plan are not fiduciary acts for they do not implicate program management (the so-called settlor versus trustee distinction). ERISA specifies a stringent set of fiduciary duties, including four major obligations: loyalty; prudence; compliance with plan terms that do not violate ERISA; and (generally) investment diversification. Plan provisions that would excuse fiduciary breach (exculpatory clauses) are explicitly barred. In addition, certain transactions involving insider dealings with the plan are prohibited regardless of fairness or whether loss ensues. Fiduciary liability with regard to participant-directed investments has received careful attention from both courts and regulators and is specially examined in the chapter.

The Romans had to cope with uncertainty and, in part, did so through a shared set of knowledge and practices, which this chapter calls a risk culture. These ways of coping contained a lower level of individuality, consciousness or reflexivity than Beck’s modern Risk Society. There was also no simple divide between lay and expert knowledge. The Roman world exposed its inhabitants to a variety of risks but the accumulated experience of coping with these represented a mutual way of mitigating the dangers.

Tropical mountain regions are characterized by complex and mostly resident avifaunas with many small-range species and a high turnover of species across mountain ranges. On a global scale, tropical mountains show an over-representation of both recently-diverged and ancient species, making them both cradles and museums of biodiversity. Tropical mountains are characterized by slight seasonality, and local habitat gradients can be maintained over a long time. The highest levels of diversification and local endemism are found in the tree-line zone. However, a few avian families also diversified in the alpine zone. Here, many species forage by probing for invertebrates in the ground and in matted vegetation, and many species also exploit carbohydrate foods, including nectar. In an environment with few large insects, co-adapted networks of nectarivorous birds and plants play an important role. There is little published evidence of avian population changes that can be related to recent global warming, as the night-time freezing conditions in open landscapes make it difficult for arboreal vegetation to expand upslope. As glaciers melt, we should expect changes in the rich avifauna of the many periglacial Andean wetlands. Re-visits to well-documented study sites in tropical mountains are now needed to evaluate the amount of change.

This chapter discusses the impact of the 1966 tobacco embargo and the war of liberation, 1972–1980 on tobacco farming landscapes in Southern Rhodesia. It integrates the political and economic aspects of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 1965 into ecological narratives towards understanding how the pressures of economic sanctions and war prompted new patterns of agrarian development and conservation practices in tobacco farms that had an impact on the environment and landscapes.

Discusses the origins of the Armstrongs and Vickers firms and their shifts into armament production. In trying to make domestic sales Armstrongs and Vickers encountered three main challenges in dealing with the British Government. First, the primacy of laissez-faire ideology within the Government, especially in the Treasury and the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. Second, the class prejudices of the southern elite dominating the British Government. The governing elite’s distain for trade made it difficult for armament firms to get any help, though the Admiralty and sometimes the War Office needed their products and so dealt with them. Third, departments such as the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service were disinclined to deal with trade, preferring to focus on high politics. In response, Armstrongs and Vickers developed strategies for the domestic and international markets: building and maintaining relationships with British elites, including through exchanging personnel with the government and supplying intelligence; building and maintaining relationships with foreign elites, including using agents for diplomacy, and bribes to facilitate sales; excluding competitors from the domestic market; if exclusion failed, then cooperating and colluding with other armament firms; diversifying when sales were scarce; providing finance to secure international sales; and innovating to generate sales.

Africa is a massive continent. One could fit all of Western and Eastern Europe (including the UK), India, Japan and China, and the United States into the continent, and still have space left. Africa, of course, has far fewer people. In 2021 an estimated 1.4 billion people lived on the African continent. The combined number for those other countries was a startling 3.7 billion people.

This makes Africa a land-abundant continent. In other words, Africa has a low labour-to-land ratio – there are about 46 people for every square kilometre in Africa as compared to 150 people, on average, in those other regions. The numbers for China (153), Western Europe (174) and India (464) are much higher.

This high land–labour ratio is not a new phenomenon. Africa has historically also had an abundance of land relative to the number of people who can work it. As we will see in this chapter, it has shaped the types of production systems and institutions that developed on the continent.

The disproportionately low level of equity owned by controllers of dual-class firms can incentivise various behaviours in the way that they manage, or cause to be managed, their firms.With controllers feeling less of the consequences from their actions, controllers may be incentivised to ‘tunnel’ profits from the company, pay themselves high executive remuneration, cause the company to take decisions primarily in the pecuniary or non-pecuniary interests of the controller rather than in the interests of shareholder wealth, pass control to unsuitable heirs, block lucrative takeovers and, when takeovers do occur, extract control premia.Management is entrenched, meaning that when controllers take such actions, the public shareholders cannot change the management team.However, controller benefits may not just harm public shareholders, and certain controller benefits can incentivise actions that are neutral or beneficial to shareholder wealth, such as profitable related-party transactions, the bonding of a visionary founder to the firm, maximising takeover value, taking a long-term approach and risk-taking.A dual-class stock tradeoff exists, and if legal regulatory and market constraints can limit the extraction of pernicious controller benefits so that they are outweighed by benign controller benefits, the structure can be net beneficial for controllers and public shareholders alike.

1. To define economic exposure and its strategic significance for the MNE.

2. To describe the various approaches to manage and minimize economic exposure.

3. To explain the added complexities surrounding economic exposure when MNEs operate multiple business models, following from a high level of diversification.

4. To introduce a new-economy financing tool, namely, crowdfunding, that could be used by resource-constrained MNEs to raise financial resources and to manage potential economic exposure across national borders.

5. To explain the linkages between the MNE’s administrative heritage and its organization of the risk exposure management function, thereby also paying attention to the advent of digital assets.