Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

Strategic (Comprehensive) Partnership, as a general concept and also as a specific foreign policy instrument for developing the European Union’s relations with key world countries (strategic partners), involves not only equivalent, mutually beneficial and institutionalized cooperation in many areas but also a joint solution to strategic (security and defense) issues and issues of regional and global governance where parties not only cooperate but also share responsibility. The objective of this article is to analyze the legal instruments (criteria) of the EU-China Strategic Partnership and to compare its character with the general legal concept of the EU Strategic Partnership. Based on this analysis we will answer the question whether the EU-China Strategic Partnership shows evidence of unclarity, imperfection and elusiveness of the EU’s Strategic Partnership.

We study the strategy for the development of standard means of communicating information between businesses and governments. At this time, almost all of the funding and activity to develop and enhance a tool for such communication, which is named eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is being done by and in the United States. We use China, who competes with the U.S. in the XBRL market, as an example to investigate if sharing the developmental effort by one, or more, additional countries would produce a more optimum result. Based on game theory, we demonstrate that China should increase investment in XBRL. The best achievable performance is when China and the U.S. almost split equally the whole XBRL market, leaving only a small portion to the “Followers”. (Followers are users that utilize XBRL, but have little or no participation in its development.) The paper provides a brief overview of the history and the reality of XBRL. The authors attempt to estimate (1) the benefits for China in the development of XBRL (2) benefits under monopoly (3) benefits under oligopoly and (4) benefits under the extreme condition with two participants equally sharing the market.