101. Note that Singapore and Hong Kong do not have formal diplomatic relations with the People`s Republic of China or Taiwan. This lack of formal links is not an obstacle, but contributes to their role as intermediaries. In the face of long-standing controversy over diplomatic recognition, the best way to maintain ties with the mainland and the island is through these informal and remote channels. The same canals have been widely used by Chinese overseas communities to hold funerals or visit the graves of ancestors buried on the mainland. 8. By nature, tacit and oral agreements do not give detailed promises and rarely refer to contingencies or remedial measures. One thinks, for example, of informal cooperation between friendly intelligence agencies such as the US Central News Agency and the Israeli Mossad. In addition to the exchange of information, both sides carry out unsired espionage. But what are the limits? What is contrary to the informal agreement and does it distinguish serious offences of “normal fraud”? To resolve these issues and promote regular cooperation, the United States and Israel signed informal agreements, beginning with a secret agreement in 1951. However, these agreements are necessarily incomplete, which sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between fraud and authorized activity.
According to Blitzer, “U.S. prison officers… Long suspected that Israel was playing quickly and easily with the long-standing American understanding, which excludes covert operations against each other. Yes, we always spy on something, even with friends and close allies. But it is far from planting a “mole” in the intelligence community of a friendly country. There is therefore a big difference between, on the one hand, the discreet operations of recording messages and the actual exploitation of paid spies in the country on the other, on the other. Over time, actors can apply sanctions and exhortations to define these possible obligations and indicate the limits of their tolerance. But the ambiguities will certainly remain. See Blitzer, Wolf, Territory of Lies: The Exclusive Story of Jonathan Jay Pollard – The American Who Spied on His Country for Israel and How He Was Betrayed (New York: Harper – Row, 1989), p. 163; and Raviv, Dan and Melman, Yossi, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel`s Intelligence Community (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 77-124. There`s a nice irony here. Goldwyn`s derogatory comments on oral chords are probably apocryphal themselves.
He regularly handled the English language, and quotes like this were often attributed to him, whether he said them or not. The murky origins of this quote highlight a fundamental problem of oral bargains. How can third parties know who really promised what to whom? Goldwyn himself answered this question: “Two words: impossible.” See Easton, Carol, The Search for Sam Goldwyn (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 150-51; and Marx, Arthur, Goldwyn: A Biography of the Man Behind the Myth (New York: Norton, 1976), 8-10. While informal contracts are widespread in modern economies, researchers and policy makers have limited systematic empirical knowledge. This paper aims to fill this gap by discussing a select sample of empirical work under the direction of a theoretical framework specifying the role of informal contracts.
