I am on the organising committee for this conference and so encourage submissions ons in response to this call for papers:
SHOULD NATION STATES ‘COMPETE'?
City University, London, 25th / 26th June 2015
The 2015 research workshop co-organised by the Association for Accountancy & Business Affairs,i City University,ii and the Tax Justice Network,iii will explore the notion of national ‘competitiveness'. This opens up possibilities for papers on a wide variety of themes, including tax wars (tax ‘competition'), the dynamics of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour' politics, regulatory degradation, regulatory arbitrage, policy responses to ‘competitiveness' pressures, the impact of ‘competitiveness' policies on home countries and third party countries.
Other related themes are likely to emerge as the workshop programme develops.
Offers of papers are especially welcome and early submission of an abstract of no longer than 300 words is encouraged. All submissions will be considered by the organising committee.
This workshop will bring together researchers, academics, journalists, policy staff of civil society organisations, consultants and professionals, elected politicians and/or their researchers, and government or international organisation officials.
The purpose of the workshop is to facilitate research through open-minded debate and discussion, and to generate ideas and proposals to inform and shape the political initiatives and campaigns already under way.
There will be a small charge for attendance at the Workshop. Participants are usually expected to finance their own travel although applications from students and others with limited means for bursary support will be considered.
More information about this workshop is available from: John Christensen, Tax Justice Network, john@taxjustice.net.
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The problem with competition, as jk galbraith put it, is that someone wins.
Cooperation is much more in the scheme of our lives.
The reality is society does not need losers
Exactly.
But those who advocate winning and losing (reductionist neo -liberals for a start) seldom want to take responsibility for the latter.
Homo sapiens are somehow meant to be at the top of the evolutionary tree. In the ‘natural world’, if you are weak or vulnerable (sick, old or very young and inexperienced) you usually end up being picked off as something else’s dinner.
Human society has been able to mitigate this and has progressively found ways to protect the vulnerable. I think that is why we are the most dominant species – because – as another poster has said – we actually co-operated rather than competed to get to this stage. We survived by sticking together. The neo-liberal idiotology we live with now (the rational man, selfish gene stuff from RAND and certain biologists) is almost a re-writing of human history.
I know that history tells us that there has been plenty of war and carnage but these may actually be punctuations in a long history of living together and learning to get long AND (dare I say it) SHARING resources. Competition for resources causes friction – whether its for housing or oil.
I often wonder when looking at children when ” one for you and one for me” is abandoned
Competition between nation states entails Diplomacy, the polite and peaceful form of war. Please take the Wikipedia article on Diplomacy and put my name on the bottom.
absolutely countries should compete… the same way as the participants of the above workshop will be competing. they’ll be ideas put forward openly, torn to shreds by others, people who’s ideas are fought for passionately by others they’ve only just met, all done hopefully without any kind of egotism and with the sole aim of finding a useful answers. i think the most powerful aspect of capitalism isn’t greed but competition. i’m sure i heard somewhere that Hayek was quite heavily influenced by Darwin, and that free-market capitalism was inspired by natural evolution (although that has always struck me as being a bit like sacking the gardener and expecting your garden to turn out exactly as you wanted it).
i think it’s what countries are competing to achieve that’s at fault; rather than competing to fill the coffers of an elite and so provide only them with ever more influence in directing humanities efforts, we should be looking for consensus amongst the general population as to what the priorities should be… tackling extreme poverty, space exploration, whatever. crowd funding is already moving us in that direction.
i’m sure i’m stating the obvious but we should be careful not to see competition as the problem, or as being necessarily harmful to cooperation, just because we currently compete in ways we don’t like.
We did wonder whether to have ‘how’ at the start of the title
Well by all means amend the title and explain as it as so when you actually start off the session.
I am sure you know what you mean
But actually, I do not think countries should compete
Indeed I do – all I mean is that if you change the title of the workshop then all you have to do is tell people why you’ve done this. They will still come. I’d like to think the sort of people you will be attracting to the event will be like-minded and will go with the flow. It would be nice to think that a lot of the ‘orthodox thinking’ out there is now being challenged as the short comings of market systems increasingly come under scrutiny. Or just mix in ‘how’ – you never know – it may generate some excellent alternatives from other contributors?
My own view on competition is how wasteful it is so I’m with you on the competition question Richard. And competing with other countries over corporate taxes knowing that you are reducing the service level of something people depended on in order to do so is unethical. The reason why we have a welfare system is because markets do not work as well as certain people tell us they do.
When I’ve been involved in the production of something or the delivery of a service, all I’ve ever focussed on is doing the best that I can and deriving pleasure and satisfaction from the quality of my work. I’ve never knowingly competed with anyone.
Anyhow, I’ll get out of your way and wish you the best with your event – ‘how’ or not.
i’m surprised you say you’ve never knowingly competed… addressing any problem usually starts out with a group of people throwing ideas forward, outbidding each other with better solutions (or ‘brainstorming’ as it’s often called).
perhaps you don’t view it as competition because it bears so little resemblance to the kind of competition we most commonly see in business and the workplace ie. use every dirty rotten trick you can think of to destroy the competition and gain the upper hand (Apple threatening to bankrupt anyone who dares copy the way they lay tables out in their shop springs to mind).
but if companies and/or individuals are managed in such a way that they have to be more transparent and sharing of their ideas/intellectual property (as is the case in the fore-mentioned brainstorming exercise), all participants benefit and the competition becomes far more productive.
i hope that’s the way things will go with countries… competing to address common problems and at the same time sharing the wisdom of their victories.
I’m not sure that you are describing competition. You seem to be describing debate to me. I’ve found that having a group of people who debate and kick around ideas usually creates the best long term solutions in terms of outcomes for services and products. I’ve been studying knowledge management for my MBA (Maybe Best Avoided) and there are studies that suggest that even in the most competitive environments, if the management help to set the scene for a team, even the most competitive individuals will contribute to a team if sharing knowledge is in the culture.
When I say that I am not competitive, it just means that I am task focussed really – I’m not competing (not in my head anyway) with anyone. It is the thrill of the chase for a good idea and being inspired by other contributors that gives me a buzz.
I think that what Richard is getting at is that the idea to compete between countries is predicated on providing benefits to the financial sector and not the people who live in those countries who are citizens and whose democratic rights to have a government that looks after their interests are undermined by politicians all to often pleasing the markets/high finance. Or something like that.