Showing papers on "International political economy published in 1987"

The Political Economy of International Relations

Abstract: After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund--were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits. In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy. Gilpin's exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin's warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.

Nuclear learning and U.S.–Soviet security regimes

Abstract: The concepts of regimes and learning have been developed in the Liberal theory of international relations, but their application has been mostly in the area of international political economy. U.S.–Soviet relations are generally explained solely in terms of Realist theory. The dichotomy is unfortunate because both strands of theory have something to contribute. Although the injunctions of an overall regime do not govern the U.S.–Soviet security relationship, it is possible to identify the injunctions and constraining effects of regimes in subissues of the security relationship. In five areas of the nuclear relationship (destructive power, control problems, proliferation, arms race stability, and deterrent force structure), it is possible to identify different degrees of learning and to see how such learning affects and is affected by the development of regimes. Looking at the U.S.–Soviet security relationship in terms of learning and regimes raises new questions and opens a research agenda which helps us to think more broadly about the processes of political change in this area.

Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate

Abstract: International Relations as an academic discipline is at a major crossroads. Since it was first constituted as an academic discipline in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, International Relations has moved through a series of ‘debates’ with the result that in the course of its development, and as a consequence of these debates, International Relations theory has been undergoing constant change and modification. After moving through the debate between Idealism and Realism in the inter–war period, between Realism and Behaviouralism in the Great Debate of the 1960s, through to the complementary impact of Kuhn’s development of the idea of ‘paradigms’ and the post-Behavioural revolution of the early 1970s and on to the rise of International Political Economy and neo-Marxist, Structuralist dependency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, International Relations has arrived at a point that Banks has termed the ‘inter-paradigm debate’.1 The effect of this evolutionary process is contradictory. On the one hand, it makes the discipline exciting and alive because of the diversity of approaches, issues and questions within it, creating opportunities for research which would previously have been deemed to be outside the boundaries of the discipline. On the other hand, the lack of an agreed core to the subject has lead to confusion and a degree of intellectual insecurity.

The political economy of Japan

Abstract: This course examines the Japanese model that was long admired for creating a growth “miracle” but has been challenged by over a decade of economic stagnation. What were the political and economic conditions that allowed Japan to emerge as the first non-Western state to industrialize and become a major economic power? How has Japan responded to the constraints and opportunities of the world economy? Why did the model fail in the nineties and will recent reforms succeed? The course investigates policy lessons from Japan’s experience. Focus will be on evaluating institutions that regulate government-society relations.

The Political Economy of Takeover Statutes

Abstract: I. Second Generation Takeover Statutes ............ 113 A. The Aftermath of MITE .................... 113 B. Why Is the Fair Price Approach So Popular? . 117 II. The Making of a Takeover Statute ............... 120 A. A Coalition Explanation of Takeover Legislation ....................................... 120 B. The Politics of Connecticut's Second Generation Statute ................................ 122 C. Predicting the Adoption of a Second Generation Takeover Statute ........................... 142 III. The Rationality of Investor Support of Fair Price Provisions ...................................... 145 A. A Decision Tree Analysis of the Decision to T ender .................................... 148 B. When Might Investors Decide to Support a Fair Price Provision? ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 IV. Conclusion ..................................... 187

The Political System

Abstract: This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resourceor land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a two-sector general equilibrium model with a tax-financed public sector, and show that in a feudal society (dominated by landed elites) productivity-enhancing public investments like the provision of schooling are typically lower in an open than in a closed economy. Moreover, we find that, under openness to trade, development is faster in a democratic system. We also endogenize the trade regime and demonstrate that, in political equilibrium, a land-abundant and landowner-dominated economy supports openness to trade. Finally, we discuss empirical evidence which strongly supports our basic hypotheses. JEL Code: F43, H50, N10, N16, O10.

Chapter 12 Markets, governments, and the “new” political economy

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the micro-economic reasons for market failure and the micro-political analysis of government performance. Governments provide goods and services directly, redistribute income, and regulate economic relations. The chapter reviews recent recommendations for the institutional reform of the budgetary process. The new political economy is concerned with the most basic question of economic policy: It discusses the circumstances where markets or governments are preferred as the institution for allocating societal resources. The new political economy is the sophistication of analytic technique. The voting process can protect against dictatorship but generally at the cost of social efficiency. In Western societies, the decision has been made to protect democracy; the task then is to search for the most efficient collective choice process consistent with this norm. The results of this examination emerge in the new quantitative political economy and the empirical examination of government spending, taxation, and regulation.

Political Science and the Study of Corporate Power: A Dissent from the New Conventional Wisdom

Abstract: Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.

Dependency Theory in the Political Economy of Health: An Anthropological Critique

Abstract: The political economy of health is a multifaceted label that subsumes at least three separate theoretical perspectives: orthodox Marxist approaches, cultural critiques of medicine, and dependency theories. Anthropologists who advocate greater attention to the political economy of health have tended to overemphasize dependency theories, which have in fact been widely assailed in the sociological literature. In this article I examine some basic premises of dependency theories and analyze their contributions and limitations for the development of theory in the political economy of health. I also maintain that political economy must learn from anthropology as well as the other way around. Through this reciprocal integration of concepts, political economic approaches will enter into regular medical anthropology to provide a synthetic new perspective on sickness and health.

State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda

Abstract: For the last two decades much of the theoretical debate within International Relations has focused on the question of the state. Some discussion has been around the analytic primacy of the state as the constitutive actor in international relations, while some has focussed on normative questions, of the degree to which the state can be regarded as the primary guarantor of what is good, within and between states. ‘State-centric’ realism has reasserted traditional positions on the state and has, through the emergence of Neorealism, asserted new ones, especially in the field of international economic relations. Other paradigms have challenged the primacy of the state, either by asserting the role of non-state actors, as in theories of interdependence and transnationalism, or by asserting the primacy of global systems and structures over specific actors, state or non-state. All three of these approaches have been influenced by broader trends within political science: Realism by orthodox political theory; Transnationalism by the Pluralist and Behavioural rejection of the state in favour of studying actions; Structuralism by theories of socioeconomic determination.

Accumulation, regulation, and social change: an essay on French political economy

Abstract: Over the last ten years, what can be called the "regulation approach" has become one of the most important paradigms in French political economy. Although not yet a unified approach, it nevertheless provides a set of recurrent concepts, and, more important, a common understanding of the process of capitalist development. Almost every topic within the realm of political economy-inflation, growth and economic crises, the role of the state, wage

The political economy of the Brazilian State, 1889-1930

Abstract: The first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material. Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929 the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. The author examines the state's performance during the First Republic in finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industries, casting new light on the state's economic structure and its impact on society. $25.00oo hardcover MEASURING CUBAN ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

The Political Economy of International Relations

Abstract: After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund--were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits. In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy. Gilpin's exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin's warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.

British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy, 1860–1880

Abstract: This paper is a study of the relationship between economic culture and trade union economic subculture during the years in which both the Victorian trade union movement and the classical economists' view of it reached their maturity. This period represented a turning point in the history of the movement, which achieved a full institutionalization and legitimation. The Webbs, and a historiographic tradition since them, maintained that these results were obtained at the price of a complete submission to the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. In the 1960s R. V. Clements challenged this view and argued that such a subordination had never taken place, and that trade unionists had managed to keep their independent views – especially at the level of economic thought. Recent discussions have been content to stress the sound and ‘aseptic’ pragmatism of the working men, and the abstruse dogmatism of the economists. A footnote quoting Clements' article seems to be all that readers can reasonably ask for. The possibility of an alternative interpretation – namely, that classical economics could actually be useful to trade union strategies and interests – has not yet been sufficiently considered. The aim of this paper is to argue that there is much evidence in support of such an interpretation.

The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy

Abstract: If there has been a dominant trend in the evolution of the modern industrial societies of this century it has been the growing importance of government in the allocation of social resources. It is important that we appreciate the fundamentally political nature of the formation of government economic policy. This survey reviews and assesses our present understanding of how the political system might shape a nation's fiscal policy. Our approach is eclectic, drawing both from economics and political science, and decidedly micro-analytic in its orientation. From economics we adopt the perspective of utility maximizing agents and the analytics of trade, agreement, and market failure. From political science we learn just how and when these individual agents might act collectively to provide public goods, redistribute income, or issue government debt. Together the micro-analytics of economics and political science form the core theory of the 'new' political economy and provide a framework for understanding the emergence, and the performance, of governments. There is no more important test for the new discipline than providing a compelling explanation for the formation of fiscal policy in democratic societies.

The Political Economy of Leviathan

Abstract: The theory of the state is something that most economists have been content to leave to the political scientists. When the state does appear in economic analysis it usually does so in one or the other of the following roles. One is as a benign and omniscient authority that obligingly imposes taxes, bounties or other measures at just the right level to offset some ‘distortion’ in the price mechanism, owing say to externalities of one sort or another, so as to assure Pareto-efficiency of market outcomes. This aspect of the state in economics is particularly pronounced in what may be called the Pigou—Meade tradition in welfare economics, which has dominated the modern developments of public finance and international trade. The other, dramatically opposed role of the state in standard economic analysis, is as the culpable or innocent tool of malevolent special interests, that instead of correcting distortions a la Pigou and Meade is the very source of them, e.g. minimum wage or usury laws, rent control, tariffs and so on. Conservative economists denounce these interventions on both equity and efficiency grounds, while liberals are apt to be apologetic, sympathising with real or alleged distributional objectives but usually pointing out that alternative (not always feasible) measures could be used that would achieve these goals at a lower cost in efficiency.

Issues in the political economy of health in Southern Africa

Abstract: Over the past few years there have been major political developments in southern Africa. In the Republic of South Africa, the National Party's short-lived reformist strategy designed to buy off black discontent and to restructure apartheid in order to meet the changing demands of the economy has simply further fuelled black aspirations for their legitimate share of political and economic power. While some of the reforms may change the character of apartheid, South Africa's rulers have shown themselves to be as determined as ever to maintain white domination and their economic and political control of the sub-continent. They are neither willing nor able to engage in negotiations over genuine power-sharing, as the failure of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Mission and the declaration of a fresh State of Emergency in the Republic on the 12th July 1986 have dramatically illustrated. Commonwealth hopes for a peaceful settlement were brought to an abrupt end by South Africa's military assault on the states of Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana. The Republic's onslaught against its neighbours reveals the intrinsic connection between apartheid and the well-being of people in the surrounding states. In the countries of the sub-continent and in South Africa itself these political and economic developments have had their repercussions in the health sphere. Violence and preventable diseases have taken an increasing toll, yet fewer resources are available for dealing with them as military preparations swallow up vast sums of money. In our report to the WHO conference on health and apartheid held in Brazzaville in 1981, we talked of the hidden violence in South Africa: the decimation of the black population by preventable diseases of infancy; the systematic destruction of family life and human health under the migrant labour system; the inadequate protection of workers' lives and safety; the deep insecurity and violence of township life; and the humiliation and degradation forced upon the majority of the population as second class citizens. 1 All these forms of violence have continued unchanged, deepened if anything by the current civil war. Despite the talk of reform, and limited changes in legislation, the racial discrepancies in the incidence of the diseases of poverty and deprivation such as tuberculosis, malnutrition and associated infections have if anything become starker. Although the South African state adopted as rhetoric many of the recommendations of the WHO Alma Ata conference on primary health care,

The Taiwan Exception: Implications for Contending Political Economy Paradigms

Abstract: This article examines the rapid economic growth that has occurred in the Republic of China on Taiwan over the past 35 years and argues that it constitutes a significant deviation from the postulates of the two major contending paradigms for studying international political economy: dependency theory and developmentalist theory. Substantively, while the ROC case demonstrates that “growth with equity” is possible in an externally oriented, market-based economy, it also suggests that the eradication of colonial institutions, effective land reform, government-directed structural transformation, national management and regulation of foreign multinational corporations (MNCs), and a fairly equalitarian distribution of wealth all play a central role in stimulating development. Theoretically, the Taiwan “exception” implies that the dependency approach is correct in focusing on structural conditions in the domestic and international political economy. However, rather than forming a holistic and unalterable syndrome as dependency theory assumes, these factors are variables, not constants, since Taiwan's economic growth and transformation resulted from the ROC's deviation from normal dependency conditions.

The Soviet study of international relations

Abstract: Foreword Curt Gasteyger Acknowledgements Introduction: the 'new political thinking' and soviet foreign policy: intellectual origins and political consequences Introduction to the first edition 1. The background: Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the theory of international relations 2. The development of soviet political studies 3. Approaches to international relations 4. The systems approach and international relations 5. The structure of the international system: the systems level 6. Critical subsystems 7. The scientific-technical revolution and the changing face of international relations Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch: Chemistry and the Political Economy of Germany, 1925–1945

Abstract: Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, accomplished scientists and prominent executives in the BASF and IG Farben chemical corporations, were drawn together by mutual admiration and common technical interests In the Nazi era, however, they came to embody competing liberal and nationalist conceptions of German political economy This article examines their relationship, the reasons for their divergent stances, and their individual contributions to the economic and productive power of the Third Reich Ironically, Bosch's understanding of his industry, his nation, and scientific progress led him to oppose the Nazis, but also to lay the basis for their recruitment of Krauch and the German chemical industry for their expansionist purposes

The Rise and Fall of American Political Science: Personalities, Quotations, Speculations:

Abstract: The article tries to link the development of American political science with a major concern of the discipline, democracy. However, the concrete forms of this development have been molded by different factors (e.g. practical politics, economic interests and cultural variants). Looking at the interplay of these factors, this paper traces the rise of American political science to a hegemonic position in the world, from the founding of the School of Political Science at Columbia University in 1880 to the heyday of behavioralism at the beginning of the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of America's role as a superpower and with the growth of representative democracy. A possible decline in the position of American political science is envisaged because of changing international power relations, problems of representative democracy and the present diversification of the discipline, which may lead to a situation where there is no American nor any other geographically specific political science, but instead differe...

Crude Politics: Oil and the Political Economy of Unemployment in Britain and Norway, 1970–85

Abstract: This article extends existing political-economic models to deal more rigorously with politics in countries with trade-dependent economies, and in particular with the policy consequences of oil-exporting in industrial countries. Models drawn from economics and finance show how much of Britain's recent unemployment results from North Sea oil, at first through speculation in sterling in rapidly-growing international currency markets and more recently through the balance of payments. In Norway, by contrast, speculation was deterred by a variety of policies on fixing exchange rates, and the unemployment problem contained by better-planned and executed employment subsidy programmes. These policy variations are explained by differences in available ideas, institutions and, ultimately, structural characteristics.