This chapter examines how digitalization reshapes the nature of the MNE. It shows that digital MNEs operate through distinct value-creation logics based on platforms, data, and network effects, enabling rapid international expansion with comparatively limited physical assets abroad. Drawing on comparative analysis, the chapter contrasts traditional and digital MNEs in terms of internationalization motives, asset configuration, process organization, and governance structures. It introduces indicators such as the FDI lightness index and internet intensity to capture the asset-light and scalable nature of digital firms. At the same time, digital MNEs face new regulatory and political tensions, particularly regarding taxation, data sovereignty, and market dominance. The chapter develops typologies of digital MNEs and situates their rise within broader structural transformations of the global economy. It concludes that digitalization does not eliminate spatiality but reconfigures it, producing new patterns of concentration, dependency, and contestation in international business.

In Leviathan Hobbes’s attention newly focuses on the practice of governing. There are five new chapters (22–-25, 27–28) on matters of government structure and policy which would concern a real ruler – in the obvious, immediate instance, Charles, the Prince of Wales. Versus the familiar theoretical question of whether Hobbes’s absolute ruler would have reason to govern well, good government is the subject of these chapters in a more practical vein. Like the policy binders prepared for incoming governments today, they advise on such domestic programmes as taxation and criminal justice and counsel the ruler to maintain control in relationships with subordinates. First, it is of interest to compare Hobbes’s ideas with Stuart and Tudor policies so as to assess their currency: How modern was his political thinking? Second, from a philosophical angle, these discussions are salient to current interpretations of Leviathan as a model of nonideal theory. Hobbes is telling rulers how to create a decent state in the context of real-world politics, a state that – albeit in necessarily imperfect ways – serves the public welfare, their subjects’ good, and their own.

This chapter asks whether increasing electoral competitiveness in weak states might be a way to induce pressure for state-building and the provision of public goods. The evidence suggests it cannot: that when politics do not cleave along programmatic lines, electoral competition is unlikely to have these salutary effects. A case comparison of two public bureaucracies charged with tax collection in contexts of widespread economic informality and clientelistic electoral politics illustrates how different levels of electoral competition can produce very different incentives to invest in state capacity. Interviews with current and former members of the Internal Revenue Service in Dakar and Lagos suggest that greater electoral competition in Senegal weakened political will to regulate and tax the informal sector, while longer time horizons of ruling party elites in Lagos increased the perceived future benefits of making costly investments in fiscal capacity. Using a panel dataset of 31 countries from 1870 to 2010, I then show that increases in electoral competition reduce subsequent tax revenue collection, but only in polities where elections cleave along less programmatic lines.

Chapter 5 continues the overview through a different analytical lens. It investigates the EU’s toolbox, describing and classifying the regulatory tools used by the EU legislature across the different lifestyles. It identifies four main types of interventions: ban and composition requirements, tax and price measures, rules on advertising and promotion and rules on mandatory and voluntary information. Beyond this systematic description and classification, the chapter serves three aims. First, it confronts the regulatory tools used with the stated objectives of EU lifestyle policy, assessing their adequacy and suggesting possible reforms. Second, it highlights the significant regulatory disparities existing between lifestyle risk factors, critically evaluating the justifications for such differential treatment. Third, it shows how health and internal market objectives are intertwined in EU lifestyle policy, generating legal frictions.

This chapter examines Congress’s taxing and spending powers, arguing that the Constitution’s first clause in the enumeration of powers originally granted only a power to tax for national purposes, not an independent power to spend for the general welfare. Textual and historical evidence, including from the Articles of Confederation and Committee of Detail, supports this as the best reading, with spending permissible only under the Necessary and Proper Clause to further enumerated powers. The chapter critiques modern doctrine, which recognizes a broad spending power allowing Congress to influence state policies indirectly, as in South Dakota v. Dole, by attaching conditions to funds. It proposes a test distinguishing genuine spending (e.g., disaster relief) from coercive regulatory attempts (e.g., conditioning funds on state policy changes), which usurp state functions. This formalist approach, rooted in the Constitution’s federalist structure, seeks to limit Congress’s ability to undermine state autonomy through expansive spending, preserving the original balance of federal and state authority critical to the Constitution’s enduring success.

Fiscal states, defined by their capacity to tax and borrow, had to negotiate the dilemma of economic interdependence – how to balance the benefits of economic interdependence with the desire for as much strategic autonomy as possible. How different governments negotiated this dilemma revealed much about their position within the international economic order. Some states sought to repatriate debt by borrowing from their own citizens, others saw advantages in borrowing abroad. Fiscal capacity was shaped by economic interdependence and became yet another site of competition between states. States compared their fiscal capacity by looking at bond yields, savings rates, and trade. New categories of comparison such as national income emerged in the context of great power competition.

Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.

This chapter shows how the Legislative Advisory Commission, a reviser type of legislature established by factions with high levels of unity and embeddedness during Argentina’s last dictatorship, amended and rejected a high share of government bills, and forced the executive to reverse, temper, or withdraw important initiatives on taxation, budgetary policy, and defense policy, which complicated the implementation of economic adjustment programs and facilitated the takeover of government by the hardliners, which ultimately led to the defeat in the Falklands War and the collapse of the authoritarian regime.

This chapter shows how the Brazilian Congress, operating in a dictatorship in which factions had unstable and uneven levels of unity and embeddedness, oscillated betwen working as a reviser and as a notary legislature. Quantitative analyses and case studies of tax policy, budgetary policy, and constitutional reforms show that while Congress was institutionally empowered to amend and reject government initiatives, it was more likely to exercise its lawmaking powers against initiatives sponsored by nondominant factions that were less able to retaliate, and less likely to be able to sustain its decisions against the executive when the presidency was controlled by a military faction with high levels of unity and embeddedness. Still, repeatedly probing the boundaries of representation, Brazilian legislators managed to frustrate important economic policies and to force the military into initiating the transition to democracy.