In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Originally published in 1984, this study focuses on petroleum agreements between non-OPEC LDCs with oil-importing LDCs and how issues such as high oil prices affect each country. The information presented in this study was drawn from interviews with petroleum officials in petroleum companies, petroleum ministries and unpublished documents such as contracts and focussing on case studies of countries such as Peru, Guatemala and Malaysia. This title will be of interest to students of environmental studies and economics.

Abstract: May 1999 - Liberalization of services at the subregional level has followed two broad approaches-the GATS model and the NAFTA model-neither of which automatically guarantees the full liberalization of trade in services. The question that participants in integration efforts at both the subregional and the broader regional level must ask is what kind of approach to liberalizing services offers both maximum transparency and the greatest degree of nondiscrimination for service suppliers. Only since completion of the Uruguay Round have developing countries in East Asia and the Western Hemisphere shown interest in liberalizing services. Ambitious efforts are now being made to incorporate services in liberalization objectives of both subregional and regional integration efforts, including in the Asia-Pacific region under APEC and in the Western Hemisphere under the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) process. At the subregional level, member countries of both ASEAN (in East Asia) and MERCOSUR (in Latin America) have chosen to follow the liberalization model set forth in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and to open their services markets gradually and piecemeal. In the Western Hemisphere, Mexico has successfully promoted the NAFTA model of a more comprehensive liberalization of services markets-and several Latin American countries have adopted the same approach. Regionally, APEC has chosen a concerted voluntary approach to liberalizing services markets. Within the Western Hemisphere, participants are defining which approach they will use in the negotiations on services launched as part of the FTAA in April 1998. In all these efforts, a stated desire to promote more efficient services markets is often hindered by reluctance to open services markets rapidly or comprehensively because of historically entrenched protectionism in the sector and ignorance of the regulatory measures that impede trade in services. Presumably it would be easier to liberalize services at the subregional level, among countries at similar stages of development (although liberalization's economic value there might be questioned). Liberalizing services at the broader regional level is a difficult and ambitious goal, given the diversity of countries involved in such efforts. Thus liberalization will probably move more slowly at the regional than at the subregional level-perhaps even more slowly than at the multilateral level. It is possible that the new round of multilateral talks on services scheduled to begin under the WTO in 2000 may well eclipse the recently begun regional efforts. This paper-a product of Trade, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to assist developing countries in the multilateral trade negotiations. The author may be contacted at [email protected].

In this important book, notable European experts in the energy field provide valuable perspectives on the principal issues raised by the liberalisation of the electricity and natural gas markets in the EU. Lawyers, business people, regulators, and policymakers who deal with matters and issues in the energy, natural resources, and environmental fields will find the details and insights presented here of great value.