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56292. Carter Center Delegation Report: Village Elections in China and Agreement on Cooperation with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, People's Republic of China 2 Mar 1998
- Publication Date:
- 03-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Carter Center
- Abstract:
- At the invitation of the government of the People's Republic of China, The Carter Center sent a delegation to observe village elections in China from March 2-15, 1998. In addition to evaluating nine village elections in Jilin and Liaoning provinces, the nine-person team, led by Carter Center Fellow Dr. Robert Pastor, reached a long-term agreement with the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) on election-related projects.
- Topic:
- Civil War, Democratization, and International Organization
- Political Geography:
- China
56293. Can U.N. Conferences Promote Poverty Reduction? A Review of the Istanbul Declaration
- Author:
- David Satterthwaite
- Publication Date:
- 07-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Wilson Center
- Abstract:
- In considering how the Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements and the Habitat Agenda, the two key documents agreed upon at the Habitat II Conference, deal with poverty (and with other important issues, such as sustainable development1), it is easy to point to a lack of precision in some of the language used, the repetition, and the tendency toward long lists of "problems" with little consideration of their linkages (and often their underlying causes). But this might also be an inevitable result of any document that had to be endorsed by representatives of so many different governments. Where the wording on some controversial issue appears unclear or imprecise, this may be because any greater clarity or precision prevented agreement by some representative of a government or some group of countries, such as the Group of 77 or the European Union.
- Topic:
- Security, Industrial Policy, Poverty, and United Nations
56294. Explaining the Emergence of Human Rights Regimes
- Author:
- Andrew Moravcsik
- Publication Date:
- 12-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Formal international human rights regimes differ from most other forms of international cooperation in that their primary purpose is to hold governments accountable to their own citizens for purely domestic activities. Many establish international committees, courts, and procedures for this purpose. Why would governments establish an arrangement that invades domestic sovereignty in this way? Current scholarship suggests two explanations. A realist view asserts that the most powerful democracies seek to externalize their values, coercing or enticing weaker and less democratic governments to accept human rights regimes. A ideational view argues that the most established democracies externalize their values, setting in motion a transnational process of diffusion and persuasion that socializes less democratic governments to accept such regimes.
- Topic:
- Democratization, Human Rights, International Cooperation, and Sovereignty
- Political Geography:
- Eastern Europe
56295. A New Statecraft? Supranational Entrepreneurs and International Cooperation
- Author:
- Andrew Moravcsik
- Publication Date:
- 08-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Studies of international regimes, law, and negotiation, as well as regional integration, near universally conclude that political entrepreneurship by high officials of international organizations—“supranational entrepreneurship”—decisively influences the outcomes of multilateral negotiations. Studies of the European Community (EC) have long stressed their informal agenda-setting, mediation, and mobilization. Yet the studies underlying this interdisciplinary consensus tend to be anecdotal, atheoretical, and uncontrolled. The study reported here derives and tests explicit hypotheses from general theories of political entrepreneurship and tests them across multiple cases (the five most important EC negotiations) while controlling for the actions of national governments. Two findings emerge: First, supranational entrepreneurship is generally redundant or futile; governments can almost always efficiently act as their own entrepreneurs. Second, rare cases of entrepreneurial success arise not when officials intervene to help overcome interstate collective action problems, as current theories presume, but when they help overcome domestic(or transnational) collective action problems. This suggests fundamental refinements in the core assumptions about transaction costs underlying general theories of international regimes, law, and negotiation.
- Topic:
- International Relations and International Cooperation
- Political Geography:
- Europe
56296. International Capital Mobility and Monetary Politics in the U.S. Congress, 1960–1997
- Author:
- J. Lawrence Broz
- Publication Date:
- 10-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Prevailing approaches to the politics of monetary policy in the United States are based on closed economy assumptions, which is appropriate for analyzing the period before about 1980. However, the opening of U.S. and foreign financial markets since the early 1980s has had a profound effect on domestic monetary policy and domestic monetary politics. The major policy effect is that the transmission channels of monetary policy now include the exchange rate. The major political effect is that the exchange rate has become a focus of concern for well-organized industries in the traded goods sector and, by extension, for Congress. This paper presents statistical evidence showing that the forces driving congressional activity on monetary policy have changed dramatically with the international financial integration of the U.S. economy. Exchange rates, as opposed to interest rates, now largely determine congressional attentiveness to monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.
- Topic:
- Economics, Government, and International Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- United States
56297. Negotiating Economic Transitions in Liberizing Polities
- Author:
- Frances Hagopian
- Publication Date:
- 05-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- How do governments struggling to consolidate new democracies enact effective stabilization and adjustment policies, reform the public sector, and deregulate markets? And what has been the impact of economic liberalization on political institutions and systems of political representation? Treating economic and political transitions as mutually interdependent, this paper couples these questions to suggest a reformulation of the conventional wisdom about how economic liberalization proceeds and how political interests are determined. It challenges the assumption that neoliberal reform is most readily achieved in liberalizing polities when visionary political leaders surrounded by coherent economic teams with comprehensive programs in place act with a wide margin of autonomy from society. It also questions the contention that structures of political representation are the outgrowth of either economic organization or the product of state engineering. The paper makes two arguments. Its central argument is that economic reform is accomplished most readily when government reformers, acting through available clientelistic, corporatist, and party-based networks of mediation, negotiate the compliance of public and private sector representatives of social actors for the introduction of market-oriented reforms. They trade public resources or legislation favoring the representational status of political or social actors in the present for the agreement of those actors to accept diminished state resources for their organizations or constituents in the future. The use of specific networks of negotiation, moreover, influences the design of liberalization policies and helps to account for national differences in the pace and sequence of economic reform measures. The paper's second argument is that those systems of political representation that are strengthened as a result of the temporary advantages that accrue to them during the process of state retreat will endure even when they are incompatible with economic liberalism. This is so because the politicians and group leaders who manage these networks have the opportunity to design institutions that will allow them to accommodate themselves and adapt their power bases to economies in which the market plays a larger role.
- Topic:
- Economics and Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- South America, Latin America, Central America, and North America
56298. Curbed Markets?
- Author:
- Kellee S. Tsai
- Publication Date:
- 05-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Our country does not permit the establishment of private banks. We must continue to investigate and impose discipline on non-banking financial institutions and other creditors that charge high interest rates. This is clearly one of the most important measures for ensuring order in the entire financial system.
- Topic:
- Economics
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
56299. The State in a Changing World: A Critique of the 1997 World Development Report
- Author:
- Devesh Kapur
- Publication Date:
- 02-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- In recent years, the World Bank has been at the vanguard in pressing for a circumscribed role for the State in developing countries. It therefore comes as somewhat of a surprise that the 1997 World Development Report (WDR - the World Bank's annual flagship publication), The State in a Changing World, underscores the continuing significance of the State in LDCs.
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, Emerging Markets, Government, International Organization, and Third World
56300. Explaining Patterns of GATT/WTO Trade Complaints
- Author:
- Christina R. Sevilla
- Publication Date:
- 01-1998
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Multilateral trade complaints are significant for politics because they serve as a stimulus for the targeted state to alter its status quo trade policy. This paper seeks to explain and predict patterns of multilateral trade complaints filed by states under the dispute settlement mechanism of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor as of 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO). A two-level model of complaint-raising is proposed, which argues that variation in the design of GATT and WTO institutions affects the costs to governments of filing complaints -- such as bureaucratic costs, information costs, and opportunity costs -- and these costs in turn affect state strategies for domestic oversight of treaty compliance by one's trading partners. Specific hypotheses drawn from the model are tested against a data set of over 300 multilateral trade complaints, from 1948-1994 under the GATT and 1995-96 under the WTO.
- Topic:
- International Relations, International Organization, and International Trade and Finance