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Begin New Search Topic International Political Economy Political Geography America Content Type Working Paper

1. The Trans-Pacific Partnership The politics of openness and leadership in the Asia-Pacific

Author:
MIREYA SOLIS and Mireya Solis
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
Trade policy, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in particular, is vitally connected to the national interests of prosperity, security, and governance. With novel rules on the digital economy, high tariff elimina- tion targets, and disciplines to address behind-the-border protectionism, the TPP creates opportunities for American sectors that enjoy competitive strength—services, advanced manufacturing, agriculture—to expand their reach in overseas markets. Projected annual income gains from this trade deal range between $57 billion and $131 billion by 2032, compared to a base- line scenario. In sharp contrast to the experience of import competition with China, the TPP will not impose large adjustment costs in terms of employment and wages, generating instead a net (albeit small) positive effect on job creation and wage rates. However, the individual costs for displaced employees are very high, and the contours of a new pro-adjustment safety net that enables workers to navigate difficult economic transitions (brought about by technological change or trade) are highlighted below.
Topic:
Globalization, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
America and Asia-Pacific

2. A Glass Half Full The Rebalance, Reassurance, and Resolve in the U.S.-China Strategic Relationship

Author:
Michael O'Hanlon
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
What is the state of the U.S.-China security relationship as President Obama’s term in office concludes? Given the centrality of this rela- tionship to the future of the region and indeed the planet, as well as the emphasis that President Obama has appropriately placed upon it, the question bears asking at this milestone in history.
Topic:
International Political Economy and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
China and America

3. A Framework for U.S. Policy toward China

Author:
Jeffrey Bader
Publication Date:
03-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
Serious people understand that the manner in which the United States deals with China will be a critical, if not the critical, overseas chal- lenge for the United States in the 21st century. China will likely be the largest economy in the world within one or two decades; the second or third strongest military soon, if not already; and competitive with the United States and Europe in global economic, and perhaps political and cultural, influence in some regions. China is ruled by a Communist Par- ty resistant to political liberalization at home and wedded to nationalist rhetoric and behavior in dealing with its neighborhood, enhancing the chances for rivalry with the United States. For those students of history who see conflict as the likely outcome when ris- ing powers encounter dominant powers, these are precursors of a dark future. How should we deal with China? What policy framework best optimizes our interests, which are multiple and not always consistent with each oth- er? Americans are in the midst of an ongoing presidential campaign that, in a better world, would be asking and answering such questions, but this is not such a campaign.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
China and America

4. How Trade with Mexico Impacts Employment in the United States

Author:
Christopher Wilson
Publication Date:
11-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Wilson Center
Abstract:
The U.S.-Mexico trade relationship is huge. The two countries trade over a half-trillion dollars in goods and services each year, which amounts to more than a million dollars in bilateral commerce every minute. With such a large volume of trade, it is not hard to believe that the number of jobs that depend on the bilateral relationship is similarly impressive. New research commissioned by the Mexico Institute shows precisely that: nearly five million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Mexico. This means that one out of every 29 U.S. workers has a job supported by U.S.-Mexico trade.
Topic:
Globalization, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Employment
Political Geography:
America and Mexico

5. Ukraine in Contemporary Geopolitical and Socioeconomic Relations

Author:
Grigoriy Shamborovskyi
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Abstract:
This paper explores topics related to Ukraine’s Relations with Russia, the EU, and the US. These relationships are explored in terms of international trade, security issues and institution building. Finally, the existence of internal political and socioeconomic divisions is discussed.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, International Security, and Political and institutional effectiveness
Political Geography:
Russia, America, Ukraine, and European Union

6. Difference within Similarity: Transatlantic Relations as a 'Community of Neighbours'

Author:
Pertti Joenniemi
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
The contribution focuses on the unfolding and tensions within the transatlantic relationship and it pursues, in particular, the question how the bonds of association between Europe and America are best comprehended and accounted for. In trying to break some new ground for theorization it argues that the Realist, Liberal and Constructivist accounts have so far come up short in terms of providing up-to-date and broadly acceptable answers. With the dominant theories focusing largely on either external enmity or internal homogeneity, difference internal to the relationship has too easily been conceptualized as destabilizing and seen as representing a rupture. In contrast, the paper assert s that while elements of enmity and homogeneity are important, communities such as the Atlantic one are also critically brought together by their internal differences. It then aims, in view of the difference-based dynamics at play and foundational for the Atlantic communality, to complement an d provide a corrective to the more established theorization of that togetherness.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, International Political Economy, and Bilateral Relations
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Europe

7. American Multinationals and American Economic Interests: New Dimensions to an Old Debate

Author:
Theodore H. Moran
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The 2008 election rekindled debate about whether US multinationals shift technology across borders and relocate production in ways that might harm workers and communities at home. President Obama now pledges to end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas. The preoccupation about the behavior of American multinationals takes three forms: (1) that US-based multinational corporations may follow a strategy that leads them to abandon the home economy, leaving the workers and communities to cope on their own with few appealing alternatives after the multinationals have left; (2) worse, that US-based multinational corporations may not just abandon home sites but drain off capital, substitute production abroad for exports, and “hollow out” the domestic economy in a zero-sum process that damages those left behind; and (3) worst, that US-based multinational corporations may deploy a rent-gathering apparatus that switches from sharing supranormal profits and externalities with US workers and communities to extracting rents from the United States. Each of these concerns contains a hypothetical outcome that can be compared with contemporary evidence from the United States and other home countries.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States and America

8. Crisis and Consensus; America and ASEAN in a New Global Context

Author:
Donald K. Emmerson
Publication Date:
02-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
No crisis is uniformly global. The suffering and the opportunity that a “global” crisis entails are always unevenly distributed across countries, and unevenly across the population inside any one country. That said, one can nevertheless argue that we—not the old royal “we” but, more presumptuously, the new global “we”—are in January 2009 experiencing the latest of four dramatic changes that major parts of the world have undergone over the last twenty years. In 1989, of course, the Berlin Wall was breached, ending the Cold War, followed by the implosion of Lenin's Soviet dystopia two years later. Nor did the 1989 massacre of proreform demonstrators in Tiananmen Square revive a command economy in China. Instead it kept the polity shut so that Deng's economy could continue to open.
Topic:
International Relations, Globalization, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States, China, America, Israel, Asia, and Berlin

9. Ready to Lead? Rethinking America's Role in a Changed World

Author:
Robin Niblett
Publication Date:
02-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Chatham House
Abstract:
During his inaugural address on 20 January 2009, Barack Obama declared to 'all other peoples and governments, who are watching today, know that we are ready to lead once more'. In the following four weeks to the publication of this report, President Obama has set the United States on a course that is meeting widespread approval around the world. He has ordered the closure as soon as possible of the Guantánamo Bay detention facilities and of other secret facilities outside the United States that had so undermined America's international credibility with its allies and confirmed the anti-US narrative of its opponents. He has appointed special envoys for Middle East Peace and to implement an integrated strategy for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has offered to 'seek a new way forward' with the Muslim world as well as to 'extend a hand' to authoritarian governments if they are willing 'to unclench [their] fist'. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has said that America will be more effective if it can 'build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries'. Both have recognized the virtues of pragmatism over ideology and the reality of interdependence.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, International Political Economy, and International Affairs
Political Geography:
United States, America, Middle East, Asia, and Latin America

10. Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power: The Strategic Consequences of American Indebtedness

Author:
Brad W. Setser
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
In the 1870s, the scope of Great Britain's financial empire exceeded the scope of its political empire. Dependence on British investors sometimes was a precursor, though, to informal—or even formal— political control. When Egypt's khedive needed to raise cash to cover his personal debt to private British banks, he sold his large personal stake in the Suez Canal to the British state. Egypt's ruler did little better managing Egypt's public debt: difficulties making payments led Britain and France to assume control over Egypt's treasury and, by 1882, to full British political control.
Topic:
Economics, Government, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Britain, United States, America, and Egypt

11. Free Hand Abroad, Divide And Rule At Home

Author:
Jack Snyder, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Abstract:
Under unipolarity, the immediate costs and risks of war are more likely to seem manageable for a militarily dominant power like the U.S. This does not necessarily make the use of force cheap or wise, but it means that the costs and risks of the use of force are comparatively indirect, long-term, and thus highly subject to interpretation. Unipolarity, combined with the opportunity created by September 11, opened a space for interpretation that tempted a highly ideological foreign policy cohort to seize on international terrorism as an issue to transform the balance of power in both the international system and American party politics. This cohort's response to the terrorist attack was grounded in ideological sincerity, but also in the routine practice of wedge issue politics, which had been honed on domestic issues during three decades of partisan ideological polarization and then extended into foreign policy.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Government, International Political Economy, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States and America

12. China's March on the 21st Century

Author:
Kurt M. Campbell and Willow Darsie
Publication Date:
05-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
After a protracted period of uncertainty concerning the nature of the foreign policy challenges that are likely to confront the nation over the course of first half of the 21st century, twin challenges are now coming into sharper relief. For the next generation or more, Americans will be confronted by two overriding (and possibly overwhelming) challenges in the conduct of American foreign policy: how to more effectively wage a long, twilight struggle against violent Islamic fundamentalists, and at the same time cope with the almost certain rise to great power status of China.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, Development, Economics, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States, China, America, and Asia

13. U.S. Public and Private Funding of Independent Media Development Abroad

Author:
Peter Graves
Publication Date:
12-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
National Endowment for Democracy
Abstract:
U.S. efforts to develop an independent media sector abroad are a relatively recent phenomenon. Both public and private funders have supported journalism training since World War II, but some of the most significant opportunities to develop the independent media sector came after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since most media in Eastern European countries and the former Soviet republics were controlled by the state during the Cold War, the fall of communism spurred American interest in developing free and independent media in these countries as a building block toward transparent and democratic societies.
Topic:
Cold War and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, and America

14. Foreign Investment and National Security: Getting the Balance Right

Author:
David M. Marchick and Alan P. Larson
Publication Date:
07-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Despite the significant benefits that foreign investment brings to the U.S. economy, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 53 percent of Americans believe foreign ownership of U.S. companies is “bad for America,” a sentiment that reached a boiling point with the proposed acquisition of the U.S. port operations of P Steam Navigation Company by Dubai Ports World (DPW). The DPW case brought to the public's attention the little-known executive committee charged with reviewing the security risks of foreign investment—the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)—and ignited a flurry of congressional activity to change its mandate and operations under the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Defense Production Act of 1950.
Topic:
Security, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Dubai

15. Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship

Author:
Étienne Balibar
Publication Date:
05-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
These new reflections on the issue of "transnational citizenship" and its aporias, which I have the possibility to submit for discussion owing to the generous invitation of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, will be presented from a European point of view, as I have done in previous essays on the same subject. But I will try to do so also in the perspective of a comparison, or better said, a confrontation, with North America, of which you are part, and where I have been working now regularly for years, albeit across the border. I do not believe in the possibility of speaking about "the global" from a point of view itself "global" -- that is, from nowhere or everywhere. But I believe in the (relative) possibility of dis-locating one's point of view, one's place of enunciation, and above all of exposing oneself to the dis-location that comes from others.
Topic:
Civil Society, Globalization, Government, International Political Economy, and Nationalism
Political Geography:
America and North America

16. Domestic Politics and International Relations in Trade Policymaking: The United States and Japan in the GATT Uruguay Round Agriculture Negotiations

Author:
Christopher C. Meyerson
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Studies Association
Abstract:
This paper is circulated for discussion and comment only and should not be quoted without permission of the author. Linked to efforts to promote trade liberalization through trade negotiations has been the recognition of the need not only to better understand the relationship between domestic politics and international relations in American trade policymaking, but also to analyze more effectively the relationship between domestic politics and international relations in other countries' trade policymaking processes.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, America, and Israel

17. Domestic Politics and International Relations in Trade Policymaking: The United States and Japan and the Gatt Uruguay Round Agriculture Negotiations

Author:
Christopher C. Meyerson
Publication Date:
02-1999
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Studies Association
Abstract:
This paper is circulated for discussion and comment only and should not be quoted without permission of the author. Linked to American efforts to achieve trade liberalization through trade negotiations has been the recognition of the need not only to improve American trade policymaking processes, but also to analyze more effectively other countries' trade policymaking processes. In order to address these needs, this paper, which is a summary of my Columbia University Political Science dissertation, develops a contextual two-level game approach that can be used to analyze trade policymaking.
Topic:
International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, America, East Asia, and Colombia

18. The Syndrome of the Ever-Higher Yen, 1971-95: American Mercantile Pressure on Japanese Monetary Policy

Author:
Ronald McKinnon, Kazuko Shirono, and Kenichi Ohno
Publication Date:
12-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
From 1971 through mid-1995, the yen continually appreciated against the U.S. dollar because the Japanese and American governments were caught in a mutual policy trap. Repeated threats of a trade war by the United States caused the yen to ratchet up in 1971-73, 1977-78, 1985-87, and 1993 to mid-1995. While temporarily ameliorating commercial tensions, these great appreciations imposed relative deflation on Japan without correcting the trade imbalance between the two countries. Although resisting sharp yen appreciations in the short run, the Bank of Japan validated this syndrome of the ever-higher yen by following a monetary policy that was deflationary relative to that established by the U.S. Federal Reserve System. The appreciating yen was a forcing variable in determining the Japanese price level. After 1985, this resulted in great macroeconomic instability in Japan--including two endaka fukyos (high-yen-induced recessions).
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, America, Israel, and East Asia