Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

WHEN T H E BROOKINGS Panel on Economic Activity began in 1970, the world economy roughly accorded with the idea of three distinct economic systems: a capitalist first world, a socialist second world, and a developing third world which aimed for a middle way between the first two. The third world was characterized not only by its low levels of per capita GDP, but also by a distinctive economic system that assigned the state sector the predominant role in industrialization, although not the monopoly on industrial ownership as in the socialist economies. The years between 1970 and 1995, and especially the last decade, have witnessed the most remarkable institutional harmonization and economic integration among nations in world history. While economic integration was increasing throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the extent of integration has come sharply into focus only since the collapse of communism in 1989. In 1995 one dominant global economic system is emerging. The common set of institutions is exemplified by the new World Trade Organization (WTO), which was established by agreement of more than 120 economies, with almost all the rest eager to join as rapidly as possible. Part of the new trade agreement involves a codification of basic principles governing trade in goods and services. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now boasts nearly universal membership, with member countries pledged to basic principles of currency convertibility. Most programs of economic reform now underway in the developing world and in the post-communist world have as their strategic aim the

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Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

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The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

Health and Wealth: Health by Association? Social Capital, Social Theory, and the Political Economy of Public Health

How to explain the surprising finding that more education did not lead to faster economic growth? Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that increases in educational capital resulting from improvements in the educational attainment of the labor force have had no positive impact on the growth rate of output per worker. In fact, contends Pritchett, the estimated impact of growth of human capital on conventional nonregression growth accounting measures of total factor productivity is large, strongly significant, and negative. Needless to say, this at least appears to contradict the current conventional wisdom in development circles about education's importance for growth. After establishing that this negative result about the education-growth linkage is robust, credible, and consistent with previous literature, Pritchett explores three possible explanations that reconcile the abundant evidence about wage gains from schooling for individuals with the lack of schooling impact on aggregate growth: - That schooling creates no human capital. Schooling may not actually raise cognitive skills or productivity but schooling may nevertheless raise the private wage because to employers it signals a positive characteristic like ambition or innate ability. - That the marginal returns to education are falling rapidly where demand for educated labor is stagnant. Expanding the supply of educated labor where there is stagnant demand for it causes the rate of return to education to fall rapidly, particularly where the sluggish demand is due to limited adoption of innovations. - That the institutional environments in many countries have been sufficiently perverse that the human capital accumulated has been applied to activities that served to reduce economic growth. In other words, possibly education does raise productivity, and there is demand for this more productive educated labor, but demand for educated labor comes from individually remunerative but socially wasteful or counterproductive activities - a bloated bureaucracy, for example, or overmanned state enterprises in countries where the government is the employer of last resort - so that while individuals' wages go up with education, output stagnates, or even falls. This paper - a product of the Poverty and Human Resources Division, Policy Research Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to investigate the determinants of economic growth.

Where Has All the Education Gone

Published originally in 1990 to critical acclaim, Robert Wade's Governing the Market quickly established itself as a standard in contemporary political economy. In it, Wade challenged claims both of those who saw the East Asian story as a vindication of free market principles and of those who attributed the success of Taiwan and other countries to government intervention. Instead, Wade turned attention to the way allocation decisions were divided between markets and public administration and the synergy between them. Now, in a new introduction to this paperback edition, Wade reviews the debate about industrial policy in East and Southeast Asia and chronicles the changing fortunes of these economies over the 1990s. He extends the original argument to explain the boom of the first half of the decade and the crash of the second, stressing the links between corporations, banks, governments, international capital markets, and the International Monetary Fund. From this, Wade goes on to outline a new agenda for national and international development policy.

The Logic of the Developmental State@@@Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization@@@The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism@@@MITI and the Japanese Miracle@@@Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization

There is nothing that economists agree more about than the virtues of free or almost free trade. So says Jagdish Bhagwati, a distinguished trade theorist, who claims that belief in the superiority of the "export promotion" (or near free trade) strategy over the "import substitution" strategy is all but universal among economists, "insofar as any kind of consensus can ever be found in our tribe."' Bhagwati's claim is supported by a survey of economists' opinions.2 The survey elicited responses to twenty-seven propositions about the economy from nearly 1,000 economists in five industrialized countries, in terms of "generally agree," "agree with provisos," and "generally disagree." Of the twenty-seven propositions, the one that elicited the most agreement was "tariffs and import controls lower economic welfare." Seventy-nine percent of the American economists and 57 percent of the whole sample generally agreed with it.3 At the level of practical policy, the consensus is expressed in the World Bank's emphasis on trade liberalization. The World Bank's Structural Adjustment Loans over the 1980s have carried more trade liberalization conditions than those in any other policy domain.4 For the World Bank, trade liberalization is the queen of policies, not just one among many. An impressive amount of evidence supports the consensus. Since the late 1960s at least nine major studies have examined the impact of trade regimes on economic growth, income distribution, and other development indicators.5 These studies all resoundingly confirm that free or almost free trade produces the best economic results (with some small exceptions) or that countries with freer, less distorted trade regimes have better development performance than countries with less open, more distorted ones. The implications go well beyond trade policy. Import tariffs and import controls are only a subset of the ways that governments try to alter the composition of economic activity. The neoclassical mainstream believes that most such interventions are a mistake--not just one mistake among many, but a mistake so big as to constitute the main reason for the slow progress of most developing countries. Compared to the effects of government intervention, external factors such as shrinking export markets and volatility in the world economy are distinctly secondary reasons for slow progress, as also are domestic factors like "inherent" market failures (market failures which are not themselves caused by government intervention). Real world markets, in this view, may well be imperfect, but real world governments are even more imperfect.6 This hypothesis has not been subject to testing in any comprehensive way, but the nine studies of trade policy do constitute the most systematic testing of

Robert Wade

Papers

The Logic of the Developmental State@@@Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization@@@The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism@@@MITI and the Japanese Miracle@@@Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization

Managing Trade: Taiwan and South Korea as Challenges to Economics and Political Science