This paper quantifies the consumption and production of cotton textiles at different stages of processing in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial era (1820–1941). It discusses the main factors that impeded the development of an internationally competitive cotton textile industry, and concludes that production in the industry increased significantly in Java during 1820–71, and again during 1874–1914 and 1934–41. However, most activity involved finishing of imported cotton cloth to suit local preferences. Spinning and weaving increased only marginally, as domestic production was precluded by the high-labour intensity of small-scale production, marginal local raw cotton production, and competitive international markets for yarn and cloth. Unfavourable and fluctuating real exchange rates discouraged investment in modern spinning and weaving ventures until trade protection and technological change in small-scale weaving caused rapid growth of domestic production after 1934.

The issue of carbon emissions in international aviation has proven difficult to deal with from a regulatory standpoint. Issues of a transnational character are regulated through co-operation and compromise, but there has been a lack of political will to achieve the necessary co-operation and compromise to deal effectively with carbon emissions in international aviation. The European Union is now trying to push for development in the regulatory sphere through the unilateral extension of its Emissions Trading Scheme to international aviation. This unilateral extension conflicts with international air law, but has recently been declared valid by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C-366/10. This article focuses on the legal arguments raised in that case, concluding that the judgment delivered by the Court is legally questionable, but may nonetheless prove constructive, as a political instrument, in the delivery of an international solution to the regulation of aviation emissions.

In the wide domain of finance, taxation is one of the issues to which public opinion is most sensitive. This paper explores why tax reform was hotly debated in Japan throughout the 1920s, focusing on the policies of the two main political parties. Though a topic rarely treated by historians, this controversy reveals a wealth of information on the concerns that lay behind policy choices in years that were marked by economic instability and social unrest; it shows, in particular, how the ruling elites tried to attenuate class conflict by enhancing the redistributive function of taxes, which had thus far been subordinated to the encouragement of rapid economic growth and the financing of state investment. While these attempts deserve attention as tentative steps towards the development of a welfare state, their limits indicate that the parties, in spite of extending the suffrage during this period, retained strong links with a restricted network of established constituents. This paper dwells especially on the earliest and least studied phase of the dispute on tax reform, in order to prove that the emergence of distinct party platforms did not stem simply from tactical considerations, but was rooted in broader policy visions.