The use of electronic commerce in international trade has grown exponentially in the last few years. However, to date few legal instruments have harmonized the law in relation to electronic communications. In response to this gap, UNCITRAL initiated the Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracts (ECC). The Convention's purpose is to “facilitate the use of electronic communications in international trade by assuring that contracts concluded and other communications exchanged electronically are as valid and enforceable as their traditional paper-based equivalents.” A simple goal, one would think, yet after several years of dormancy only two nations have ratified the Convention. However, the Convention may now be on the brink of coming into force as the Australian Parliament recently passed the Electronic Transactions Act 2011, which was explicitly drafted to comply with the ECC. Within the next year the Australian process will likely be complete at which time the Convention will come into force. Upon this occurrence, this unknown Convention will begin to impact the enforceability of electronic communication in key regions and industries. Consequently, it is imperative that practitioners have a basic understanding of the Convention's coverage.

This contextual analysis of Islamic financial law challenges our understanding of both Islamic law and global financial markets.

Research and innovation in the life sciences is driving rapid growth in agriculture, biomedical science, information science and computing, energy, and other sectors of the U.S. economy. This economic activity, conceptually referred to as the bioeconomy, presents many opportunities to create jobs, improve the quality of life, and continue to drive economic growth. While the United States has been a leader in advancements in the biological sciences, other countries are also actively investing in and expanding their capabilities in this area. Maintaining competitiveness in the bioeconomy is key to maintaining the economic health and security of the United States and other nations. Safeguarding the Bioeconomy evaluates preexisting and potential approaches for assessing the value of the bioeconomy and identifies intangible assets not sufficiently captured or that are missing from U.S. assessments. This study considers strategies for safeguarding and sustaining the economic activity driven by research and innovation in the life sciences. It also presents ideas for horizon scanning mechanisms to identify new technologies, markets, and data sources that have the potential to drive future development of the bioeconomy.

How does international law change? How does it adapt to meet global challenges in a volatile social and political context? The Many Paths of Change in International Law offers fresh, theoretically informed, and empirically rich answers to these questions. It traces drivers, conditions, and consequences of change across the different fields of international law and paints a complex and varied picture very much in contrast with the relatively static imagery prevalent in many accounts today. Drawing on inspirations from international law, international relations, sociology, and legal theory, this book explores how international law changes through means other than treaty-making. Highlighting the social dynamics through which different areas and institutional contexts have generated their own pathways, it presents a theoretical framework for tracing change processes and the conditions that affect their success. Based on this framework, each contribution illuminates the paths of change we observe in contemporary international law. The explorations centre on strategies, forms, forces, and social contexts and draw on primary source material and in-depth case studies. Overall, the volume offers a fascinating account of an international legal order in flux-with a dynamic not captured through traditional doctrinal lenses-and helps situate change processes and their varied implications in international law and politics. A relevant book for everyone wanting to understand change and its consequences in international law. This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

Theoretical and empirical perspectives on the fragmentation of production processes across borders, shedding light on global sourcing decisions and their economic effects. Recent decades have seen a fragmentation of production processes across borders, as firms find it increasingly profitable to organize production on a global scale. This fragmentation occurs across national borders as well as across firm boundaries; companies must decide not only the location of production but also how much control to exert over the different production stages. Economists have responded to this shift by developing new models of global sourcing, generating important insights into the driving forces and economic effects of this new form of globalization. Many questions, however, remain unanswered. This book tries to fill this gap. The contributors ask new questions or offer new modeling approaches to fragmentation of production, focusing in particular on time and uncertainty. They examine global sourcing in firms' multinationalization strategies, including offshoring, product scope, managerial incentives, supplier search, and contractual issues; and explore the interactions of global sourcing, exports, and economic development, investigating such topics as the complementarity of offshoring and exporting, product diversification, and the relationship between vertical linkages and development. Each chapter presents recent research that further develops existing models or documents new empirical patterns related to global sourcing. Contributors Pol Antràs, Sasan Bakhtiari, Sebastian Benz, Giuseppe Berlingieri, Johannes Boehm, Jeronimo Carballo, Huiya Chen, Alejandro Cuñat, Fabrice Defever, Swati Dhingra, Harald Fadinger, Ana P. Fernandes, Christian Fischer, Wilhelm Kohler, Bohdan Kukharskyy, Luca Marcolin, Antonio Minniti, John Morrow, Alireza Naghavi, Han (Steffan) Qi, Jens Suedekum, Deborah L. Swenson, Edwin L.-C. Lai, Anders Rosenstand Laugesen, Ngo Van Long, Heiwai Tang, Erdal Yalcin

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

These proceedings address the latest developments in the broad area of intelligent construction integrated in the mission of the International Society for Intelligent Construction (ISIC) which aims to promote intelligent construction technologies applications from the survey, design, construction, operation, and maintenance/rehabilitation by adapting to changes of environments and minimizing risks. Its goals are to improve the quality of construction, cost-saving, and safety, exploring fundamental issues related to the application and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning techniques and technology. ISIC 2022 is the 3rd ISIC international conference, held in Guimarães, Portugal on September 6–9, 2022, and follows the previous successful instalments of the conference series in China (2019) and USA (2017). It took a holistic approach to integrate civil engineering, construction machinery, electronic sensor technology, survey/testing technologies, information technology/computing, and other related fields in the broad area of intelligent construction. The respective contributions cover the following topics: Artificial Intelligence for Design and the Built Environment, Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Construction Automation and Robotics, Intelligent Construction, Sustainable Construction, and Sustainable and Smart Infrastructures. Given its broad range of coverage, the book will benefit students, educators, researchers and professionals practitioners alike, encouraging these readers to help the intelligent construction community into the digital era and with a vision on societal issues.