LDC Infrastructure Development in the Era of 'Nationalistic Rhetoric': Do International Investments Agreements Still Mitigate Sovereign Risk and If Not, Does It Matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Less Developed Countries (LDCs) provide enormous opportunities for companies involved in the development of infrastructure. LDCs couple significant need with often insufficient 'in country' capability or expertise, meaning that foreign companies willing to expand operations into LDCs can find interesting and profitable opportunities. International infrastructure development naturally brings with it the sovereign risks associated with contracting with the government of a LDC. During the last thirty years, governments of LDCs have actively sought the execution of International Investment Agreements (IIAs) with other nations in an attempt to mitigate the appearance of sovereign risk and encourage greater international investment. This has included encouraging foreign companies in the delivery of infrastructure projects. In the last five years, however, worldwide political support for IIAs seems to be waning, as nationalism and populism threatens to replace globalism and multiculturalism as the dominant economic and political theories in the USA, Europe and Great Britain. In a global political landscape dominated by nationalistic rhetoric, we are unlikely to see continued popular support for the protection of foreign companies against national interests by way of IIAs. We are likely to see not only fewer new IIAs, but conceivably governments revoking their agreement to existing IIAs coupled with waning support for ICSID arbitrations. The author submits, however, that there will not necessarily be a marked increase in sovereign risk as a direct result, and that LDCs will continue to provide worthwhile markets and opportunities for infrastructure development. The author submits that IIAs never in any event provided complete protection, and that protection against sovereign risk remains available through the underlying contract and in many cases, through political risk insurance. Further, international participants should look at projects with shorter timeframes to secure the return on investment, and avoiding taking sole risk on project by operating in joint ventures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".