Border Flows

Declining access to fresh water is one of the twenty-first century's most pressing environmental and human rights challenges, yet the struggle for water is not a new cause. The 8,800-kilometer border dividing Canada and the United States contains more than 20 percent of the world's total freshwater resources, and Border Flows traces the century-long effort by Canada and the United States to manage and care for their ecologically and economically shared rivers and lakes. Ranging across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Northwest Passage to the Salish Sea, the histories in Border Flows offer critical insights into the historical struggle to care for these vital waters. From multiple perspectives, the book reveals alternative paradigms in water history, law, and policy at scales from the local to the transnational. Students, concerned citizens, and policymakers alike will benefit from the lessons to be found along this critical international border.

The rapid growth of crypto assets raises important questions about their cross-border usage. To gain a better understanding of cross-border Bitcoin flows, we use raw data covering both on-chain (on the Bitcoin blockchain) and off-chain (outside the Bitcoin blockchain) transactions globally. We provide a detailed description of available methodologies and datasets, and discuss the crucial assumptions behind the quantification of cross-border flows. We then present novel stylized facts about Bitcoin cross-border flows and study their global and domestic drivers. Bitcoin cross-border flows respond differently than capital flows to traditional drivers of capital flows, and differences appear between on-chain and off-chain Bitcoin cross-border flows. Off-chain cross-border flows seem correlated with incentives to avoid capital flow restrictions.

Governing Cross-Border Data Flows explores how the European Union can simultaneously reconcile and pursue two important legal and policy objectives, namely: protecting fundamental rights guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter) concerning privacy and personal data, while also maintaining and developing a binding, rules-based global trading system to ensure appropriate access to foreign digital markets for EU businesses. The book demonstrates a significant conflict between international trade law and European data privacy law when it comes to the governance of cross-border flows of personal data. To resolve the tensions caused by this clash, the book proposes concrete and detailed ways to ameliorate the situation from both ends (international trade and personal data protection), specifically through reforms of both international trade and chapter V of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To explain how such reforms could be effectuated, Yakovleva examines the role of discourse in the evolution of trade law in the last two decades. The book also paves the way for the further research necessary to design a fully-fledged reform proposal of the EU framework for the transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area.

In order to measure the dynamics of flow-performance relationships for a multi-domicile sample, Simon Weiler applies existing flow-performance research methods to a broad set of European equity (UCITS) funds and proves that major findings (performance-chasing behaviour and a convex flow-performance relationship) also hold true in a cross-border market environment.

While global uncertainty—measured by the VIX—has proven to be a robust global “push” factor of international capital flows, there has been no systematic study assessing the role of country-specific uncertainty as a key (pull and push) factor of international capital flows. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature by examining the effects of country-specific uncertainty shocks on cross-border banking flows using the confidential Bank for International Settlements Locational Banking Statistics data. The dyadic structure of this data allows to disentangle supply and demand factors and to better identify the effect of uncertainty shocks on cross-border banking flows. The results of this analysis suggest that: (i) uncertainty is both a push and pull factor that robustly predicts a decrease in both outflows (retrenchment) and inflows (stops); (ii) global banks rebalance their lending towards safer foreign borrowers from local borrowers when facing higher uncertainty; (iii) this rebalancing occurs only towards advanced economies (flight to quality), but not emerging market economies.

Trade and investment policies face a changing geopolitical environment. They also face challenges from the interactions and limits of Canada’s multiple trade agreements with other countries. These challenges take on varied forms in different sectors that involve the bordering of energy trade, food safety, and related environmental and public health issues. Similarly, bordering dynamics differ significantly for cross border flows of tourism, skilled labour, and irregular migration. This book uncovers and analyzes factors that govern economic activity and human interaction across Canada’s “fluid” border. The contributors to this collection engage major domestic political, technical, and administrative factors that shape the conditions for and constraints on effective international policy and regulatory cooperation. Published in English.

Global capital flows have multiplied many times over in recent years, mainly between advanced economies but increasingly also to emerging markets, reflecting the general reduction in regulatory and informational barriers. Thus, with international asset positions now dwarfing output, global portfolio allocations and reallocations have profound effects on the world economy, as demonstrated by recent boombust episodes of both global reach (e.g., the transmission of the 2001 IT shock and the 2008 mortgage market shock from the United States) and regional significance (in Asia, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe). Such cycles and reversals in cross-border capital flows should not be surprising, given that these flows - more so than domestic ones - imply crossing informational barriers, currency and macroeconomic risks, and regulatory regimes.