The politics of productivity: foundations of American international economic policy after World War II
TL;DR: The years immediately after World War II provided American policy makers with a unique opportunity to help shape the international economic order for a generation to come as mentioned in this paper. But much of the way policy makers envisaged international economic reconstruction derived from the ambivalent way in which domestic economic conflict had been resolved before and during the New Deal.
Abstract: The years immediately after World War II provided American policy makers with a unique opportunity to help shape the international economic order for a generation to come. United States objectives are usually described in terms of enlightened idealism or capitalist expansionism. But much of the way policy makers envisaged international economic reconstruction derived from the ambivalent way in which domestic economic conflict had been resolved before and during the New Deal. In the inconclusive struggle between business champions and the spokesmen for reform, Americans achieved consensus by celebrating a supposedly impartial efficiency and productivity and by condemning allegedly wasteful monopoly. Looking outward during and after World War II, United States representatives condemned Fascism as a form of monopoly power, then later sought to isolate Communist parties and labor unions as adversaries of their priorities of production. American blueprints for international monetary order, policy toward trade unions, and the intervention of occupation authorities in West Germany and Japan sought to transform political issues into problems of output, to adjourn class conflict for a consensus on growth. The American approach was successful because for almost two decades high rates of growth made the politics of productivity apparently pay off. Whether an alternative approach could have achieved more equality remains an important but separate inquiry.
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TL;DR: The authors argued that U.S. policymakers saw their potential European allies as relatively equal members of a shared community, while America's potential Asian allies, in contrast, were seen as part of an alien and inferior community.
Abstract: Regional groupings and regional effects are of growing importance in world politics. Although often described in geographical terms, regions are political creations and not e xed by geography. Even regions that seem most natural and inalterable are products of political construction and subject to reconstruction attempts. Looking at specie c instances in which such constructions have occurred can tell us a great deal about the shape and the shaping of international politics. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States attempted to create and organize both a North Atlantic and a Southeast Asian region. The institutional forms of these regional groupings, however, differed dramatically. With its North Atlantic partners, the United States preferred to operate on a multilateral basis. With its Southeast Asian partners, in contrast, the United States preferred to operate bilaterally. Why? Perceptions of collective identity, we argue, played an underappreciated role in this decision. Shaped by racial, historical, political, and cultural factors, U.S. policymakers saw their potential European allies as relatively equal members of a shared community. America’ s potential Asian allies, in contrast, were seen as part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community. At the beginning of the Cold War, this difference in mutual identie cation, in combination with material factors and considerations of efe ciency, was of critical importance in dee ning the interests and shaping the choices of U.S. decision makers in Europe and Asia. Different forms of cooperation make greater or lesser demands on shared identities. Multilateralism is a particularly demanding form of international coop
416 citations
TL;DR: The so-called theory of hegemonic stability is a research program composed of two distinct theories as mentioned in this paper, namely, leadership theory and hegemony theory, which aims to explain the production of the international economic infrastructure.
Abstract: The so-called theory of hegemonic stability is a research program composed of two distinct theories. Leadership theory builds upon public goods models and seeks to explain the production of the international economic infrastructure. The theory is extended here by identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions and explicating when leadership is likely to be benevolent or coercive. Hegemony theory, subsuming three independent analytic traditions, focuses on the different structurally derived trade policy preferences of states and attempts to explain international economic openness. The core logic of each variant and questions for future research are examined. Neither leadership nor hegemony theory has been tested adequately by existing empirical studies. While theorists have generally failed to present their arguments in an appropriate fashion, empiricists have not been sufficiently sensitive to variations in the theory and have produced studies that suffer from inadequate theoretical and operational specification and theoretical "over-extension." At this stage, formal tests should not seek decisive disconfirmation of the research program but should aim to provide guidance for further theoretical refinement.
258 citations
TL;DR: The United States trade balance, a measure of the international demand for American goods, is suffering historic deficits as discussed by the authors, which has led to the underutilization of both labor and capital in a growing number of traditionally competitive American industries.
Abstract: Nowhere is America's hegemonic decline more evident than in changing trade patterns. The United States trade balance, a measure of the international demand for American goods, is suffering historic deficits. Lowered demand for American goods has led to the under-utilization of both labor and capital in a growing number of traditionally competitive American industries. Conversely, Americans' taste for foreign goods has never been so great. Japanese cars, European steel, Third World textiles, to name a few, are as well produced as their American counterparts and arrive on the U.S. market at a lower cost.
250 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine several cases of policy innovation in the area of economic and social regulation where the influence of foreign models is quite clear: the development of competition policy in Europe in the 1950s, the growth of European Community regulation, and the impact of the American deregulation movement on the telecommunications policies of different European countries.
Abstract: Because events occur too fast and ideas mature too slowly for responses to be designed anew for each pressing problem, policy innovation often relies on pre-existing models, foreign or domestic. This seems to be especially true for regulatory policymaking, since public regulation is typically introduced in conditions of crisis. In this paper we examine several cases of policy innovation in the area of economic and social regulation where the influence of foreign models is quite clear: the development of competition policy in Europe in the 1950s, the growth of European Community regulation, and the impact of the American deregulation movement on the telecommunications policies of different European countries. The analysis shows that while utilization of preexisting models is a common feature of policy innovation, such models are not literally translated into current policy. More or less extensive adaptations to a particular political, institutional and economic context are usually required. We also identify two distinct ways – push or pull – in which foreign models can affect domestic policy.
213 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that there should be cross-national similarities in the way issues are treated, whatever the styles particular nations adopt, and that the nature of political issues themselves causes the politics associated with them.
Abstract: A vigorous tradition in comparative politics argues that national policymakers develop characteristic and durable methods for dealing with public issues, that these can be linked to policy outcomes, and that they can be systematically compared. More recently, a number of scholars have suggested reversing the direction of causality, claiming that the nature of political issues themselves causes the politics associated with them. This policy sector approach implies that there should be cross-national similarities in the way issues are treated, whatever the styles particular nations adopt. The two approaches need to be integrated into a common framework built around a research strategy that investigates policymaking within specific sectors across multiple national cases. Such an approach can transcend the often sterile debate over whether the policies of nations are unique or are converging by seeking to explain how the nature of issues structures the variation among the policies of nations.
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25 Mar 2017
TL;DR: The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson, 1933a) as discussed by the authors was written by Joan Robinson, who also began her long intellectual friendship with Richard Kahn, after only one year of studying economics.
Abstract: When Joan Robinson came to write The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson, 1933a), she also began her long intellectual friendship with Richard Kahn. At much the same time, Kahn was writing his extraordinary fellowship dissertation for King’s, The Economics of the Short Period (Kahn, 1929; 1989), after only one year of studying economics (see Harcourt, 1991; 1993). She almost certainly attended some of Piero Sraffa’s remarkable lectures on ‘Advanced theory of Value’ (see Marcuzzo, 2005), which were given at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. As an undergraduate in the early 1920s she became familiar with the contents of A. C. Pigou’s, Dennis Robertson’s and, especially, Gerald Shove’s, lectures and writings (in Shove’s case, writings were rare) on Marshallian and Pigovian value theory. Joan’s supervisor at Girton, Marjorie Tappan-Hollond, with whom she did not get on (but see Ch. 1, p. 3, n6), was also a staunch Marshallian. Austin Robinson was working on his The Structure of Competitive Industry (1931), ostensibly a textbook for the Cambridge Economic Handbook series, but in reality an original and innovative monograph on the theory of the firm (as John Whitaker (1989) points out; see also Harcourt (1997a; 2001a)), probably even before she started her book, certainly simultaneously with it. (As we saw, Joan and Austin had married in 1926 and went to India for two years, returning to Cambridge in the late 1920s.)
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TL;DR: In this article, a state-power theory of international political economy is proposed to explain the structure of international trade, identified by the degree of openness for the movement of goods, which can best be explained by a state power theory.
Abstract: The structure of international trade, identified by the degree of openness for the movement of goods, can best be explained by a state-power theory of international political economy. This theory begins with the assumption that the nature of international economic movements is determined by states acting to maximize national goals. Four goals—aggregate national income, political power, social stability, and economic growth—can be systematically related to the degree of openness in the international trading system for states of different relative sizes and levels of development. This analysis leads to the conclusion that openness is most likely to exist when there is a hegemonic distribution of potential economic power. Time-series data on tariff levels, trade proportions, regional concentration, per capita income, national income, share of world trade, and share of world investment are then presented. The first three are used to describe the degree of openness in the trading system; the last four, the distribution of state power. The data suggest that the state-power theory should be amended to take into consideration domestic political constraints on state action.
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