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Mexico has a long experience with highly majoritarian variants of mixed‐member systems, but has recently been made more proportional in a process of democratization. Electoral reform has developed along two major axes: the degree of proportionality, and the composition of the electoral authority, with the parties often trading openness on one axis for closure on the other. Sometimes trade‐offs in reform negotiations followed a third dimension—the registration requirements for new parties. This chapter first describes the evolution of the Mexican electoral formulae from 1963 to today, explaining the rationale of each phase of reform either as a majority party decision or as a trade‐off between government and opposition; the phases described are the plurality party deputy system (1963–1976), the mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) minority representation system (1979–1985), the governability clause of the 1988 law, the governability clause with ‘moving escalator’ of the 1991 law, and the abandonment of the governability clause in the 1994 law. The last part of the chapter focuses on the last round of electoral reforms (the 1997 law), in which the mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) system reintroduced in 1994 (after the earlier brief interludes of systems that combined MMM with mixed‐member proportional (MMP) arrangements under the 1988 and 1991 laws), was further reformed to result in a more proportional allocation of seats, with the dominant principle depending on the vote distribution.

Since its creation in 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been responsible for ensuring free trade and marketplace competition in the sale and regulation of domain names, as well as overseeing the stability of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the creation of consistent, functional policies. Therefore, its responsibilities include assessing when, and to what degree, additional generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are needed in order to ensure the proper functioning of the DNS. In order to make such a determination, ICANN relied on the input of interested Internet stakeholders as mandated through its multi-stakeholder model, which involves interested business entities, individuals, and governments from around the world.

The presence of a charge over a company’s property will reduce the likelihood of an unsecured creditor obtaining payment, or at least a substantial dividend, in the insolvency of the company. The prudent unsecured creditor will bear this in mind in assessing whether to advance credit to a company, and at what level. For this reason a system of charges registration has long been employed, initially with a separate scheme for England and Wales and another for Scotland, in order that unsecured creditors can be aware of the presence of charges. This system has recently been revised and simplified and a single scheme now applies in the UK with effect from 6 April 2016. Charges created by UK companies prior to that date remain subject to the previous regime.

This chapter focuses on the constraints imposed on the flow of foreign capital that could supplant the underfunding of potential growth opportunities by local capital. This fundamental risk indicator is built using both de jure and de facto measures of capital account openness. De jure, or “on paper” measures, include the existence of foreign investor registration requirements, foreign currency convertibility restrictions, or withholding taxes on dividends and interest income from foreign investments. These are traditionally linked to the direct channels through which financial globalization plays a role in economic growth. De facto measures of foreign access are those that are not ordained by law, but that add complications for foreign investors and inhibit the ability of doing business in a hassle-free manner. The recent case study of China’s Spreadtrum Communications and its opportunities and challenges as a US-listed stock illustrates both measures of foreign access.

Chapter 6 examines the role of voter identification requirements to register and cast a ballot in the 2016 U.S. election. Evidence is drawn from a county-level data set based on public records of votes cast for the two major party candidates to investigate the effects of lax and strict voter registration requirements in 50 U.S. states plus D.C. on the number of votes won by Clinton and Trump at county level, controlling for the demographic characteristics of counties, such as educational and poverty levels. The study concludes that, even with these controls, the type of voter ID laws did significantly impact the outcome; in the 2016 election, the estimates suggest that voter ID laws increased GOP support by 1.8% and lowered support for Democrats by 0.7%. In close contests, this made a difference, with voter ID significantly influencing the vote in favor of the GOP.