Border Frictions

How did Canadian border officers come to think of themselves as a "police of the border"? This book tells the story of the shift to law enforcement in Canadian border control. From the 1990s onward, it traces the transformation of a customs organization into a border-policing agency. Border Frictions investigates how considerable political efforts and state resources have made bordering a matter of security and trade facilitation best managed with surveillance technologies. Based on interviews with border officers, ethnographic work carried out in the vicinity of land border ports of entry and policy analysis, this book illuminates features seldom reviewed by critical border scholars. These include the fraught circulation of data, the role of unions in shaping the border policy agenda, the significance of professional socialization in the making of distinct generations of security workers and evidence of the masculinization of bordering. In a time when surveillance technologies track the mobilities of goods and people and push their control beyond and inside geopolitical borderlines, Côté-Boucher unpacks how we came to accept the idea that it is vital to deploy coercive bordering tactics at the land border. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, social theory, politics, and geography and appeal to those interested in learning about the everyday reality of policing the border.

Based on ethnographic research conducted over several years, Market Frictions examines the tensions and frictions that emerge from the interaction of global market forces, urban planning policies, and small-scale trading activities in the Vietnamese border city of Lào Cai. Here, it is revealed how small-scale traders and market vendors experience the marketplace, reflect upon their trading activities, and negotiate current state policies and regulations. It shows how “traditional” Vietnamese marketplaces have continually been reshaped and adapted to meet the changing political-economic circumstances and civilizational ideals of the time.

Because trucks in Bangladesh and India are not allowed to operate across the border, cargo is transloaded at the border, and Indian trucks traveling between northeast India and the rest of India must go around Bangladesh through the Siliguri Corridor, which significantly increases transport and trade costs. This lack of integration means that it is more costly for Bangladesh and India to trade with each other than for either of them to trade with Europe. As a result, bilateral trade represents only about 10 percent of Bangladesh’s trade and a mere 1 percent of India’s trade. Connecting to Thrive: Challenges and Opportunities of Transport Integration in Eastern South Asia presents a collection of innovative technical analyses that show what is needed to achieve seamless connectivity in the region. The report explores the extent to which the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) supports the cross-border operation of road transport services and identifies the gaps in the agreement that need to be addressed to improve its effectiveness. It assesses the potential shift of freight traffic to new routes and modes in eastern India and Bangladesh once the MVA is implemented and the potential impact of the MVA on wages, employment, and income in Bangladesh and India. It explores how the local impacts of a regional corridor could be enhanced in rural areas by improving access to markets along the corridors and how women’s participation in export-oriented agriculture value chains could be improved to allow women to take advantage of improved regional connectivity. Connecting to Thrive will be of interest to policy makers, private sector practitioners, and academics with an interest in regional connectivity in eastern South Asia.

David Stevens Space-based information, which includes earth observation data, is increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. We have been relying for decades on data obtained from meteorological satellites for updates on the weather and to monitor weather-related natural disasters such as hurricanes. We now count on our personal satellite-based navigation systems to guide us to the nearest Starbucks Coffee and use web-based applications such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth to study the area of places we will or would like to visit. At the same time, satellite-based technologies have experienced impressive growth in recent years with an increase in the number of available sensors, an increase in spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions, an increase in the availability of radar satellites such as Terrasar-X and ALOS, and the launching of specific constellations such as the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), COSMO- SkyMed (COnstellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation) and RapidEye. Even more recent are the initiatives being set-up to ensure that space-based information is being accessed and used by decision makers, such as Sentinel Asia for the Asia and Pacific region and SERVIR for the Latin America and Caribbean region.

International banks greatly reduced their direct cross-border and local affiliates’ lending as the global financial crisis strained balance sheets, lowered borrower demand, and changed government policies. Using bilateral, lender-borrower countrydata and controlling for credit demand, we show that reductions largely varied in line with markets’ prior assessments of banks’ vulnerabilities, with banks’ financial statement variables and lender-borrower country characteristics playing minor roles. We find evidence that moving resources within banking groups became more restricted as drivers of reductions in direct cross-border loans differ from those for local affiliates’ lending, especially for impaired banking systems. Home bias induced by government interventions, however, affected both equally.

Real borders can be thick. They are not dimensionless lines as typically assumed in theoretical models and standard empirical analyses, but a zone populated by agencies that develop and administer regulations firms have to comply with when engaging in international trade, many of which have their own procedures. Borders can then easily become a labyrinth hard to get through. This is crucial because border agencies' procedures influence the time needed to ship goods from their origins to their destinations and can thereby affect trade, particularly in a context characterized by increasingly segmented production chains and rising lean retailing. Latin American and Caribbean countries have recently implemented various trade facilitation initiatives that aim to streamline the administrative processing of trade flows and accordingly reduce trading times. These initiatives include risk management, single windows, authorized economic operators, simplified postal exports, and expedited transit arrangements, all of which are cornerstones of the 2013 WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation and have been subject of multiple international organizations' operations. Despite of being ubiquitous, evidence on the impact of these specific initiatives has been extremely limited. Lack of precise data has been a major obstacle. Out of the Border Labyrinth fills this gap and sheds entirely new light on the trade effects of such trade facilitation measures and the channels thereof. It presents the results of thorough impact evaluations, which have been carried out by applying rigorous methods on unprecedented transaction-level data for several countries in the region. These results reveal that trade actually expanded as a consequence of such facilitation measures and that the primary channel has been shipping frequency. Based on these econometric examinations and careful institutional case studies, Out of the Border Labyrinth systematizes a new line of trade policy research and informs policymaking and assistance activities by international organizations by providing tools that will help design and assess policies in an area that will be very active in upcoming years as countries work towards implementing the multilateral agreement reached in Bali.

Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely varied ecologies of south-western China, Myanmar and north-eastern India, with their rugged terrain, high mountains, monsoon-fed rivers and marshy lowlands, is certainly subject to friction. But today, harsh political realities have created hard borders and fractured this trans-Himalayan terrain. However, the closely researched chapters in this book demonstrate that these borders have not prevented an abundance of movements, connections and flows. Mobility has always coexisted with friction here, but this coexistence has been unsettled, giving this space its historical shape and its contemporary dynamism. Introducing the concept of the 'corridor' as an analytical framework, this collection investigates mobility and flows in this unique socio-political landscape.

This edition of OECD's periodic economic survey of Mexico examines key challenges Mexico faces in the medium-term including strengthening public finances, maximising the gains from integration into the world economy, improving infrastructure ...