Recent events emphasize the growing interdependence between government policy and international financial markets. The shifting patterns of ownership of firm permitted through international trade in equities alter the coalitions in support of particular policies and thereby change the nature of government intervention. This paper focuses specifically on the influence of international financial markets on the use of strategic trade policies.
High unemployment rates that have persisted in most OECD countries over the last twenty years remain one of the main global economic problems. The worrying fact is that after two decades of supply-side policies, whose collateral damage has included greater job insecurity and rising income inequality (Galbraith, 1998), unemployment rates are quickly increasing again as falling aggregate demand levels push the world economies towards recession. The problem is compounded by a reluctance of most governments to use demand-side policies to attenuate these costly cyclical episodes (Mitchell, 2001b).
High-latitude climate change will have an impact on the carbon and water cycles in northern ecosystems. Stable isotopes in these systems can serve as indicators of changes and feedbacks. Monitoring the stable isotopic composition of Arctic river discharge provides a means to investigate integrated basin-scale hydrologic changes in remote northern regions. I measured water d18O and dD from the Kolyma River in Siberia and local precipitation to partition the river flow into 60% snow and 40% rain inputs.
