This Chapter provides health policymakers, managers, and care providers with an overview of strategies that enforce the key principles of good governance presented in Chapter 4. Strengthening participatory governance, building policy capacity, institutionalizing procedures to incorporate evidence in policymaking, and building regulatory capacity are critical for strengthening participation, transparency, and accountability and enforcing the rule of law. There is a variety of potential strategies that health system managers can adapt to improve governance of health systems at the policy, institutional, and healthcare professional levels, these include: (1) strengthening effectiveness of decentralization at the policy level; (2) linking accreditation to incentives, such as public funding or contractual agreements, at the institutional level; and (3) professionally led self-regulation at the health care professionals’ level. Control of corruption requires political reforms with a focus on open exchange of information, channels for participation of citizens in policymaking, and penalties for the misuse of power. It is important to note that the evidence on governance strategies in L&MICs remains elusive. Health leaders and managers need to cautiously assess and adapt strategies to their own contexts.

Chapter 3 explores government sensitivities to terrorist violence. If the situation in Xinjiang is to escalate into something with broad international implications, it will be because Chinese domestic politics lead it to do so. As a consequence, it is vital to understand Chinese official sensitivities about terrorism. To develop this insight, we turn to official media coverage of terrorist violence to clarify how Chinese government authorities balance domestic and international priorities when approaching terrorist violence. Specifically, we examine media coverage of terrorist events in Xinjiang and provide an empirical account of how quickly and how transparently authorities provide information about these incidents to their domestic audience. We show that while transparency can foster the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy at home and abroad, the Party nearly always prioritizes short-term domestic stability. This reveals the extent to which counterterrorism policy is, and will likely remain, conservative and risk averse.

Rule combination can contribute to morphological simplicity. Synchronically, rule combinations (like word combinations) are sometimes stored as formulaic units, and this fact contributes to a morphological system’s processing simplicity, since accessing a stored rule combination directly is simpler than decomposing that combination into its component rules for separate lookup. Stored, formulaic rule combinations may also contribute to diachronic simplifications of a language’s morphology, since they are the locus of reanalyses that may eventuate in “affix telescoping,” the development of a rule combination into a simple rule. But affix telescoping is not a monolithic phenomenon; it involves the reduction of a rule combination’s combinatory transparency along at least four dimensions. Thus, it is possible to find rule combinations that are progressing toward reanalysis as simple rules without yet having reached the point of reanalysis.

Chapter 4 explores the utility of different WTO rules in disciplining market-distortive behaviour of SOEs and subsidies, including GATT rules on import monopolies, state trading enterprises (STEs), transparency, and anti-dumping (AD) measures. In our view, these rules are all of limited utilities, albeit for different reasons: the rules on import monopolies and STEs are quite narrow in terms of the coverage of policy instruments and the prescribed obligations, the transparency obligation is rather tooth-less, while the ability to use AD measures to deal with market distortions due to state intervention has been curtailed by the Appellate Body (AB) in recent cases.

Chapter 6 provides a critical evaluation of the new rules on SOEs developed in international trade and investment agreements, with the CPTPP as the leading example. Despite its reputation as a ’twenty-first century high-standard trade agreement’, we argue that the SOE rules in the CPTPP do not add much to the existing rules in the WTO and are less rigorous than China’s WTO-plus obligations discussed in Chapter 5. This chapter then examines some major post-CPTPP trade and investment agreements with significant rules on SOEs, including the EU–Japan FTA, the EU–Vietnam FTA, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the CAI. As one of China’s latest international agreements, the CAI is also the first treaty where China agreed to SOE rules outside the WTO. Again, the main substantive obligation here – the one on commercial considerations – simply repeats the existing obligation in China’s WTO accession package. While all of the FTAs discussed in this chapter should be praised for setting new and higher standards of transparency, they do not resolve the longstanding problem of enforcement – the most challenging issue under the WTO’s transparency regime.

This chapter explores the changes that AI brings about in corporate law and corporate governance, especially in terms of the challenges it poses for corporations. The law scholar Jan Lieder argues that whilst there is the potential to enhance the current system, there are also risks of destabilisation. Although algorithms are already being used in the board room, lawmakers should not consider legally recognizing e-persons as directors and managers. Rather, academia should evaluate the effects of AI on the corporate duties of boards and their liabilities. By critically examining three main topics, algorithms as directors, AI in a management board, and AI in a supervisory board, the author suggests the need for transparency in a company’s practices regarding AI for awareness-raising and the enhancement of overall algorithm governance, as well as the need for boards to report on their overall AI strategy and ethical guidelines relating to the responsibilities, competencies, and protective measures they established. Additionally, the author argues that a reporting obligation should require the boards to deal with questions of individual rights and explain how they relate to them.

The EU has been reluctant to engage in the negotiations for a UN treaty on business and human rights because such a treaty would have an impact on the competitiveness of EU-based corporations in the global marketplace, in particular, vis-à-vis competitors from developing and emerging states. Bearing in mind these observations relating to the EU’s position in the ongoing treaty process, this chapter aims to assess whether the EU has been able to mitigate the effects on the competitiveness of EU-based corporations in its unilateral ‘business and human rights’ legislative initiatives. After assessing which initiatives have been prioritised by the European Commission, this chapter investigates to what extent competition from non-EU corporations – and, in particular, corporations from developing and emerging states – has been taken into account during the drafting process of these initiatives, and to what extent they have a regulatory impact on such corporations. This chapter also discusses private international law issues.

The law scholar Dustin Lewis explores the requirements of international law with regard to the employments of AI-related tools and techniques in armed conflict. The scope of this chapter is not limited to Lethal Autonomous Weapons (AWS) but also encompasses other AI-related tools and techniques related to warfighting, detention, and humanitarian services. After providing an overview of international law applicable to armed conflict, the author outlines some preconditions necessary to respect international law. According to Lewis, current international law essentially presupposes humans – and not artificial, non-humans – as legal agents. From that premise, the author argues that any employment of AI-related tools or techniques in an armed conflict needs to be susceptible to being administered, discerned, attributed, understood, and assessed by human agents.

We conclude with an analysis of the constraints that the connections world imposes on Asia’s growth prospects, and the policy options for relaxing them. One is the ability of powerful businesses and families to entrench themselves by virtue of their connections to government and/or politicians. Both parties gain so there is no incentive to change. Because marginal changes are unlikely to be credible, we propose a series of interrelated radical measures to disrupt and refashion the connections world including prohibitions on cross-holdings and inheritance taxation, as well as boosting competition policy and improving political transparency. We also outline some of the main pressure points in Asia going forward. These include the ability to innovate and construct effective entrepreneurial ecosystems and the pressure to create sufficient jobs. There is also the ballooning inequality of income and wealth. High inequality is associated with economic under-performance and susceptibility to political turmoil. Progressive taxes can mollify inequality, but permanent solutions rest in targeting their source: the connections world.

While witnessing the dismantling of a rule-based multilateral trading system, trade negotiators and diplomats in the US and the EU have revamped trade liberalisation through free trade agreements (FTAs). The failed TPP, TTIP, the renegotiation of NAFTA, and the rise of the Pacific Alliance in Latin America have put trade policy under scrutiny by media and civil society. As a result, trade negotiators have acquired new legal expertise in administrative and investment law to justify the need for innovative FTAs. As part of their limited negotiating capital, trade negotiators and diplomats have deployed neutral concepts of transparency and efficiency to justify the incorporation of domestic preferences. An analysis of the EU’s four Asian FTA transparency commitments offers insights into how national transparency mandates, together with geopolitical realities of international trade regimes, constitute the bargaining power of trade negotiators. The politicisation of legal expertise and trade negotiator’s negotiating capital creates a set of constraints and agency that allows for wiggle room in articulating, bargaining, and drafting what appears as neutral transparency provisions in FTAs.

A global federal government would be a mighty instrument – and lots of power-hungry leaders and groups from around the planet will no doubt vie with each other to manipulate it to their parochial ends. The global institutions will therefore need to incorporate robust mechanisms to ensure that they remain rigorously accountable, fully transparent, and genuinely independent and impartial in their basic functioning. Four features would therefore be important to include in such a government: strong subsidiarity, the separation of powers, an executive branch with plural leadership, and a high bar of supermajority voting before major action can occur in the world legislature. A second key goal for this government will be to reduce the gross disparities in wealth and opportunity that divide the world’s peoples. One plausible mechanism for achieving this would be a UN-run system of Guaranteed Minimum Income, implemented globally. Such a government could also adopt pragmatic policies to nudge the world’s autocratic nations toward higher degrees of democratization and respect for human rights.