GO Academic Worldbuilding [Foreign Scholars Welcome!]

by **Vienna Eliot** » Sat Oct 03, 2020 7:47 pm

Greater Olympus
Academic Worldbuilding Thread
Foreign Scholars Welcome

What is this?
This is a general worldbuilding thread for the region of Greater Olympus. Everything in this thread takes an academic perspective on the history of background of our regions and its nations. Among other things, this is a thread for:

1. Lectures at Olympian colleges and universities.
2. Articles from academics journals in Olympia.
3. Essays and discussions from Olympia's leading scholars.
And while this is a thread for nations in Greater Olympus to post about their nations and the region, foreign scholars are welcome to ask questions and discuss the scholarly work posted in this thread. We hope you enjoy your time perusing our database — there really is some wonderful information about our community in here. And who knows? Maybe you'll decide to join us!

What can I post here?
If you are not a member of Greater Olympus, then you're a visiting scholar. You can ask questions to the lecturers and scholars here that elaborate on their work. And, because this is an academic setting, you might even be inclined to argue with them about their conclusions.

If you are a member of the region, then you can post any worldbuilding and lore about your nation that you like. The only requirement is that it be in an academic context. As I mention above, lectures from scholars who study your nation, academic articles, and even speeches from public figures at universities can belong in this thread. If you need inspiration for academic media of communication, look here.

In general, remember to include the name of the author or lecturer, as well as the venue or publication they're speaking at or writing in. And, of course, excerpts from larger works are welcome here.

Academic Database
Once we have a sufficient number of posts, we'll start to categorize things in a table of contents here so that they're easier to find.

Learn more about our awesome region!

by **Vienna Eliot** » Thu Feb 18, 2021 6:29 pm

Trade Agreements Since 1988
Melville Roman and Mohammed Roman, in Trade Politics and the Modern State

In what was at the time considered a polemical presentation at the Global Tax Law Symposium in Senone in 2003, David Zhou argued persuasively that, as far as tax law was concerned, the global economy had reached its terminus (Zhou 2003). There were no meaningful developments left to be made, he claimed, and any amendments that were going to be made to existing bilateral trade agreements or — God forbid — national tax codes were at best going to be minor in nature, inconsequential, and relatively obscure when scholars went to ruminate on them twenty, thirty years in the future. Most of us agreed with him. Tax law, it seemed, was an area of settled and black letter law.

We were wrong. Since 2003, major developments in national tax codes and international tax and trade agreements have completely shifted the field, as have increasingly complex strategies on the part of corporations (covered in chapter 3) to avoid and evade taxes through base erosion and profit shifting overseas. The tools and strategies used in this epic struggle between governments and large companies constitutes the theme of this book, but this chapter in particular seeks to provide an overview of major tax developments since 1988.

Why 1988? Keen students will observe that the first major modern trade agreement (which is a term inclusive of tax treaties; though the term tax treaty is not necessarily inclusive of trade agreements) took place under the auspices of the Liran Consortium in 1991. But to only discuss the Liran Consortium in its later stages would disregard its predecessor of the same name, whose primary advocate, Vishal Vig, was not Liran at all, and who spent a great deal of his term as Prime Minister of Oceania securing international buy-in for the concept.

With that said, what follows are the major developments in trade agreements and tax treaties since the start of the Liran Consortium in 1988.

The 1988 Liran Consortium (Lira I)
Vig conceived the Consortium shortly after his government was reelected in 1984, envisioning "a room of power brokers who could regularly commit to a single course of action for several nations" (Carlisle 1995). This kind of global order failed to ever materialize, but the Liran Consortium itself — which deceivingly did not consist exclusively of Liran nations — did emerge from the wreckage of the 1982 plutonium debacle as a chokepoint for bilateral treaties between the nations that agreed to be a part of it.

Lira I failed for two reasons. First, it had no authority, express or implied, to negotiate multilateral instruments, and the people who were sent to the table were often civil servants (technically foreign servants) with no outstanding political interests. When everyone at the table has job security and a pension, there is little incentive to take bold action. Instead, the Consortium, which had its own headquarters in Salzewinde and gradually came to function culturally like its own nongovernmental organization, exclusively concerned itself with the burdensome review of bilateral agreements. Because Lira I effectively precluded the possibility of multilateral agreements, these bilateral treaties could number in the thousands every year, and the Consortium, under the leadership of famously unbeholden Neeran Tamboli, had little consternation to review them all in an orderly timeframe.

The second reason Lira I did not live up to Vig's and others expectations was its decidedly conservative approach to actually approving the treaties it was tasked to review. Given the alternative between being a rubber stamp and a brick wall, Tamboli held a deep conviction that her job was to reject every treaty at least one time, and most twice; she said so herself (Tamboli 2009). In retrospect, this was a frustrating development for countries that had agreed to sign Lira I, and even more frustrating for those that had agreed to a ten year commitment to the organization.

Richard Lam, the Prime Minister of Oceania who had been Leader of the Opposition during the last years of Vig's reign, considered it the President's sovereign prerogative to withdraw from any international agreement, even one to which the country had agreed to remain a part of for another eight years. The Presidency agreed, and after one agreement was returned to Annheim from Salzewinde an extraordinary nine times, Oceania withdrew from the Liran Consortium in the summer of 1990. By December, more than half of all participants followed suit.

The 1991 Liran Consortium (Lira II)
Lam had a poor relationship with Vig, who claimed that had a Vig Government been on the ticket in 1988 Lam would still be in opposition. Not to be outdone, Lam all but eradicated one of Vig's signature foreign policy achievements (Lira I), and then proceeded to remake it in his own image. Whether this was deliberate is up for debate, but Lam was keenly aware that the 1991 Consortium had the same name as Vig's 1988 Consortium. Today, scholars and policy professionals refer to the former as Lira II.

Lira II was the first definitive move toward a globalized economy since the Ino-Magno Accords after the Olympic War which laid the groundwork for the modern financial system. Formerly an arduous process to coordinate, tax code alignment and multilateral trade facilitation were provided by Lira II a platform that, though imperfect, was centralized enough to enable the dramatic growth of multinational corporations and suddenly nix what scientists at the time were projecting could become a global food insecurity crisis.

The innovation of Lira II was not its authority to directly negotiate multilateral agreements, but rather its de-formalization of the underlying process. Instead of an organization, Lira II was a framework. Its staff was limited to an administrative secretariat that arranged meetings and filled out paperwork. When the Consortium met, political appointees attended the meetings, and members found it difficult to justify bilateral talks when the barriers to entry for multilateral agreements were often lower.

Strictly speaking, the agreements in 1994, 1998, and 2003 were brokered under the framework of Lira II.

The 1994 Newton Round
The Newton Round took place in the thralls of the Mu-Kal Recession of the 1990s, so it was either fitting or ironic that the ceremonial part of negotiations took place in the famous Tumbran trading port. Though a number of agreements had been drafted under Lira II prior, the Newton Round was a highly publicized and frequently reported on event, one which had a determined agenda to slash tariffs by half and pivoted from eliminating double taxation to opening up the world economy.

The Round, which eliminated some $5 billion in tariffs, took an aggressive line-item approach that would have previously been unconscionable in a single negotiation round; the confluence of academics, business interests, civil servants, and politicians was a huge administrative undertaking that paid off in terms of hundreds of details being hammered out each day for six months. Negotiations ultimately failed to put a dent in non-tariff barriers to trade, but successfully broke down farm trade restrictions and secured early agreements that would allow later steps to help developing countries.

These strategies mainly affected nations that were "developed" in the traditional sense, which at the time was reflected in large navies, investment in infrastructure projects at home, and dependence on a few key players in the logistics sphere. Navies and infrastructure did not benefit from the Newton Round, which both reduced the need for governments to defend exclusive shipping lanes and incentivized shifting funding to brownfield infrastructure and, though accidentally, to agricultural subsidies. Logistics, on the other hand, benefited greatly from the agreements, and a coordinated logistics industry saw a boom that would pull Mu-Kal out of recession.

The Newton Round began the practice of creating annexes to the Lira II framework to extend the framework's capabilities, with the Newton Annex providing for large scale, formal rounds for negotiation.

The 1998 Sifkas Round
Few consider the Sifkas Round to be a major success, though the agriculture industries benefited immensely from its agreements. If anything, the Sifkas Round demonstrated for the first time the power of lobbyists and nongovernmental organizations to influence international conversations. After planning to break down non-tariff barriers to trade, negotiators arrived in Sifkas only to find that hundreds of special interests had descended on the city in advance with the goal to move negotiations away from financial goals and toward coordinated agricultural subsidies.

Since the Newton Round had started an evident move away from agricultural subsidies, the mission was all the more urgent for the dairy and bovine lobbies, which were under particular pressure from environmental movements and much less, though just as public, pressure from vegans.

While the decision of attending countries to cooperate on subsidies was a win for impacted industries, the Round was a defeat for the Lira II framework more generally. The negotiations were marred by poor organization and controversial management of large street protests, and the disagreement over the planned agenda and the one that ultimately drove negotiations drove a wedge between developed nations and developing nations, the latter of whom were meant to benefit the most from the Sifkas Round and in fact benefited the least. Developing country representatives became resentful and uncooperative on being excluded from talks as Mu-Kal and Liran countries attempted to cement a mutual deal on agriculture.

As an aside, the organized labor working group, which operated on schedule in a different part of town, proved very successful. Its recommendations were adopted in a minor deal in 2000 (Kripp 2002).

The 1999 Coordinated Economic Development Accord
The CED Accord took place outside of the Lira II framework, but its impact on national tax code coordination was critical to the modern strategies employed by corporations to reduce their tax liabilities and move profits offshore. Though the CED Accord was, technically speaking, a single document, it actually functioned more as a master agreement that governments were then able to bilaterally implement (this is what lawyers refer to when they mention CEDMAs, or "seed-ma"s).

CEDA also played an important role in enabling more robust methods of military funding, which under incidental provisions of various Lira II agreements had become increasingly difficult to finance with debt. CEDA's liberalization of special purpose vehicle securitization roughly aligned how governments could hypothecate debt instruments for defense acquisitions without collateralizing actual military assets. Rothmik (2017) discusses this in greater detail.

The 2003 Cartaganca (C) Round
Of course, the outstanding issue with the CEDMA framework was that it couldn't be integrated with Lira II, both because it was designed for bilateral tax mitigation and because of its conflict with earlier Lira II agreements. The Cartaganca Round was originally called under ordinary Lira II provisions to reconcile outstanding CEDMAs with future Lira II agreements, but evolved into a formal round under the Newton Annex to resolve a series of issues that had arisen with the new millennium. CEDMA reconciliation was never addressed, and remains an active area of international tax practice (Roman and Roman 2012).

Instead, the C-Round, as it came to be called, set out a number of objectives, including to reduce now excessive agricultural subsidies, to lift restrictions on foreign and cross-border investment, to begin the process of opening trade in services like banking and insurance, and to include the protection of intellectual property in national and international law.

The C-Round accomplished this and then some, also developing international arbitration standards and setting a timeline for a comprehensive review of intragovernmental trade policies. The final agreement and the annex to Lira II was signed in Zeleya, which proved unique in that it wasn't signed in the original host city. The atmosphere was optimistic and forward-looking, but this proved to be the final Newton Annex round under Lira II, for reasons still debated by scholars (Carsanne 2011; Hoff-Ellison and Stockton 2015). A hypothetical "D-Round" has been proposed but never called, and the Liran Consortium Secretariat is unlikely to attempt to convene another round without a unanimous request from Consortium member governments.

The 2011 Section 110 (Double Ofrax) Agreement
The difficulty of calling a Newton Annex negotiation bubbled to the surface in 2007, when about half of the members of the Consortium submitted petitions to the Secretariat for a D-Round. Because Lira II is a framework, however, that any country can disavow at any time (as Oceania did under Lam), it is risky to call a round without unanimous buy-in. The Newton Annex provides no required number of petitions for the Secretariat to call a formal round, but under the Sifkas Annex a preliminary round to set the agenda is contingent on petitions submitted in the preceding four years. This proved more difficult to coordinate than even the most complicated tax policies.

As a result of being unable to successfully convene a D-Round, several Lira II participants as well as two non-members (the 2+2) convened sporadically to coordinate a series of bilateral tax treaties with Ofrax, whose Section 110 of an amendment to the tax code enabled a complex debt-consolidation strategy that allowed sufficiently complex companies to pay an effective tax rate of 2.5% in Ofrax and then move profits back to their home country with no further taxation.

The 2+2 developed a convoluted tax code coordination that solved the Ofrax problem but rendered their CEDMAs ineffective. As a perverse incentive, this increased military budgets in participating countries as it became more difficult to collateralize debt financing for military acquisitions; in turn, non-participant neighbors raised their own military budgets, creating a brief arms race for the remainder of the decade.

2016 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (Bondragonne) Treaty
The Bondragonne Treaty convened negotiators both from within and without the Liran Consortium to resolve problems that had spiraled out of control in the wake of the Double Ofrax Agreement. Bondragonne — named with tongue-in-cheek for the resort country and personal tax haven that had suddenly seen an explosion in foreign assets due to the failure of dozens of CEDMAs — sought to fix the errors made in the Double Ofrax that struck down eighteen years of tax practice.

Bondragonne was much less a political exercise than previous negotiations since 1988, featuring legions of lawyers drafting airtight treaty language based on shared goals that didn't need much negotiation at all. Ratified broadly, it largely repealed the Double Ofrax and replaced it with a more elegant solution that didn't overturn the global economy.

The 2019 Olympian Multilateral Trade Facilitation Conference (Schloe Round)
With Lira II firmly in the past, Oceanian President Vienna Eliot remade trade talks in his own image. Though he successfully prevented discussion of the OMTFC as a long awaited "D-Round," Eliot dismayed at the reference to the talks as the "Schloe Round" (Carville-Ewing 2019), which he felt were too reminiscent of the Lira II rounds.

The OMTFC tackled a broad agenda, with a gargantuan administration seeing to its completion in only six months, a feat that was not lost on its attendees. Tariffs and technical barriers were both eliminated, and a safety net framework was developed for multilateral tax treaties in case CEDA once again failed to deliver. With special provisions for developing nations that enticed otherwise reticent parties to sign the final act of the conference, the OMTFC package ultimately delivered an unprecedented $24 billion in free trade.

The result, though, was delayed. The Palo Alto crisis (Sykes 2021) ended the public ceremonies at just the worst time, and delayed signing for months. The period of uncertainty, coupled with environmental crises and a banking crisis in Ofrax, triggered a global recession (Sykes and Reynolds 2020).

The 2020 "Ricardo Plan"
Lykensburgish Preaident Kenneth Diaz hoped that the Mu-Kal Union, established in 2019, would take the lead in bringing an end to the global recession. But in fact, it was his rival, newly chosen Oceanian President Alison Ricardo, who is widely credited with combatting the impending economic catastrophe (Roman 2020). Her "Ricardo Plan," as it was called by both supporters and critics, involved intense negotiations directly between Ricardo and other world leaders, as well as a public relations strategy, that targeted military spending and advocated more infrastructure and lenient banking regulations.

The plan succeeded, in large part, due to the buy-in of the MU and Liran Consortium members. A number of nations notably did not follow the recommendations of the Ricardo Plan, such as Tanaya, but the plan reduced worldwide military expenditures overall and revived the economy relatively quickly.

We mention it here not because it necessarily constituted a trade agreement or tax treaty in its own right, but because it may reflect the future of how such agreements might be brokered: not at major conferences, whose public relations strategies can fall apart and which require increasingly large administrative efforts, but behind closed doors, between world leaders, and in private contexts that rely less on written agreements and more on coordinated government policy.

2021 Western Liran Free Trade Agreement
Cisparrania, Lunderfrau, Meronnia, and Produzland, in line with the early stages of the precedent set by the Ricardo Plan, negotiated with Western Liran Free Trade Agreement in 2021 mostly behind closed doors. Without much public fanfare, if any, negotiators brokered the multilateral trade deal over industrial materials and defense exports at the urging of then newly elected Meronnian President Augustin Lajoie — though scholars have noted that Meronnian Foreign Secretary Antoine Beaudouin engineered the technical side of the agreement (Budoir 2021),

The agreement set a new standard, though, not just for negotiating in semi-private spaces, but for multilateral agreements. While the Ricardo Plan and its early descendants focused on bilateral solutions conducted between many nations at a time, the Western Liran FTA proved that existing bilateral relationships can be turned into sweeping multilateral arrangements without the administrative or public relations burdens of Lira II and the Schloe Round.

Particularly noteworthy is the scalability of the agreement. At the time that this textbook was published, only four nations were members of the FTA. However, its language is carefully crafted to allow for expansion across Lira, demonstrating an increasing international commitment to long term, sustainable trade agreements, rather than merely circumstantial ones made to solve immediate problems.

Roman, Melville and Mohammed Roman. "Trade Agreements Since 1988." In Trade Politics and the Modern State, 53–64. Schloe: Hoffman Press, 2021.

GO Academic Worldbuilding [Foreign Scholars Welcome!]

GO Academic Worldbuilding [Foreign Scholars Welcome!]

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