Calculable Power in International Organization： A Case Study of IMF Quotas and Voting Rights Reform

Voting procedure is an important mechanism for public choice in international organizations. This paper measures and compares [MF member countries＇ voting power before the 2008 reform and after the 2010 reform on the basis of datasets on IMF quotas and voting rights distribution provided by IMF. Our study verifies that IMF＇s quotas and voting rights reforms do help to reduce the voting power gap among member countries. The 2008 and 2010 reforms produce a greater improvement in emerging members＇ voting power under the 70 percent majority rule than the 85 percent rule; the 70 percent majority rule means the United States would lose its absolute veto. Moreover, the paper disproves the underlying assumption that regards a member＇s voting power as proportional to its voting rights. Countries with different amounts of voting rights can still have the same voting power.

Simone de Beauvoir on the Situation and Rights of French Women Colonizer

The goal of this paper is to establish from Simone de Beauvoir＇s perspective what happens when the situation and rights of French women are examined from the purview of their position as colonial subjects--as women colonizer. Following the analysis of Beauvoir as featured in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, the author first begins by examining the situation and rights of French women colonizer as it relates to the situation of the colonized. And then, the author examines the situation and rights of these women from their own stands as women and in relationships to the situation and rights of white French men. The paper concludes that while French women may have experienced white privilege, they suffered from gender oppression deriving from their second-class status as French colonial subjects.

Have the Private Benefits in Italian Firms Decreased？

The topic of the paper is the estimate of the benefit of control, according to the Barclay and Holderness method. The reference system of this research is Italy, given that the empirical evidence of the past which had underlined private benefits particularly high among Italian companies and the reference period is 1999-2007. The idea of this research is to demonstrate that, since the Legislative Decree No. 58 of February 24, 1998 （Consolidated Law on Finance, henceforth Consolidated Law）, which has significantly changed the protection of minority shareholders, in Italian, the intensity of private benefits has on average declined sharply. To this end, considering the results of the empirical researches on periods pre-1998 and at the turn of the Consolidated Law, the paper provides evidence that the improvement of minority shareholder protection already shown by these researches is further accentuated over the years, because of the effects that the new regulatory framework has produced. In fact, the basic assumption is that the important laws, as Consolidate Law, require several years to produce the desired results in full. This idea is supported by the findings of research that show an average percentage of private benefits dropped to five percent of the capital. Hence, the investigation is extended to the demonstration of comparability of this estimation with other estimations quoted in literature, verifying the statistical significance of the correlations between the measures estimated and the variables considered as determinants in much of the literature.