The Determinants of and Prospects for Foreign Direct Investment in Japan

Although Japan experienced a significant jump in inward foreign direct investment (FDI) around the turn of the millennium, the level of inward FDI penetration remains much lower than in many other countries. Looking at the factors that determine Japan's attractiveness as an investment destination for foreign multinationals, this paper examines the prospects for future FDI inflows. Topics addressed include the macroeconomic outlook for Japan (an important factor for market-seeking FDI), political, social and cultural factors reflecting Japan's willingness to embrace globalization, and policies the government could pursue to attract more FDI. It is argued that although Japan has clearly "opened up," lingering unease over a more laissez-faire market economy and inward foreign inward remains widespread and certain patterns from the past are beginning to reappear. A key issue in this context are merger and acquisition (M&A) rules and their implications are discussed in detail. The paper concludes by suggesting that unless Japan embarks on further substantial deregulation, increases in FDI inflows are likely to remain moderate and inward FDI penetration will continue to significantly trail behind that in other major advanced economies.

China's IT Leadership

With the rapid expansion of China's information and communications technology (ICT) sector, there has emerged a strategic group of IT leaders. These IT leaders are characterized by their "amphibiousness". On the one hand, they have become bridges that introduce Western concepts of competition and decentralization to China. On the other, they do not want to challenge the state because they feel comfortable with their personal ties to promote their business interests. They belong to the "non-critical realm" of social elites and have not coalesced into a coherent and organized social force. Even though they may not represent an independently innovative force that would push for political change in China, they have become catalysts and have created part of the necessary conditions for political changes, for example enhancing institutional performance of the state and creating a forum for public debate and political participation of the grassroots. Therefore, they have a subtle political impact on state responsiveness and civic participation. By carefully contrasting the autonomous, parasitic, symbiotic, negotiating, and amphibious actor models, this study of IT leadership in China emphasizes the creative aspect of politics--their visions, craftsmanship, and courage for ICT diffusion in China. In contrast with the top-down or bottom-up paths of Communist transitions in East Central Europe, the Chinese path seems to be grounded in the middle. The conclusion of this dissertation is that in a time of uncertainty, a strategic group of IT leaders starts to inspire and lead this nation in new directions like a spark when China is in desperate need of a systematic and convincing rationale and vision for its progress in an era of great transformation

The Return of the State? French economic policy under Nicolas Sarkozy

This paper addresses the EU’s influence on the design of market-building objectives and dispute settlement mechanisms in Mercosur and SADC over time. It argues that such influence has had an independent effect on the evolution of regional institutional design that is not reducible to mere functional dynamics, which dominant explanations emphasize. Instead, it suggests that EU influence is best conceived as a process of spurred emulation, according to which major political or economic crises in the regions have led to the increasing emulation of EU arrangements, spurred by the EU’s active involvement in the process. This has, however, neither led to a wholesale copying of EU institutional models nor to the adoption of EU practices, but EU templates have regularly been adapted to fit with policy-makers’ normative convictions, especially their continuing concerns about national sovereignty

The European Commission in the World Trade Organisation: a question of roles, responsibilities and interests

This thesis sets out to answer the question: What roles and responsibilities have accrued to the European Commission in relation to its operations within global trade negotiations, how have these been interpreted and pursued, and how have they been affected by changing patterns of interests and institutions in the world trading system? The thesis has as its central empirical focus the activities of the European Commission in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) from 1995 to 2003—that is to say, from the foundation of the Organisation to the failure of the Cancun Ministerial. It focuses on the roles and responsibilities of the Commission within trade negotiations and identifies the ways in which it has been affected both by the interests that it serves, or confronts, and by changes in the broader context of the negotiations themselves. The thesis argues that the need to maintain this complex balance of roles, responsibilities and interests in a changing environment creates patterns of path dependency and a search for consistency that reduces the possibility of creative adaptation on the part of the Commission. [Continues.

Second-Order Network Development in India: Mobile Phone Users and the Indian Premier League

This dissertation examines second order network formation on India's large and rapidly expanding mobile phone networks. It does so by examining a particular second order network - the Indian Premier League (IPL) mobile network. Using a case study approach and a mix of ethnographic methods and textual analysis, I explore the history that preceded the IPL mobile network, the intentions of its creators, the processes by which users participate on the network, and the outcomes of network expansion and evolution. I deploy the space of flows concept of Manuel Castells, to draw attention to continuity and change in Indian communication networks, and to highlight the new spatial dynamics at work in mass mobile telephony. This dissertation emphasizes the transformative nature of second order networks and identifies the ways that masses of users can disrupt and alter communication networks, especially in contexts of informal economics and power structures

On studying the unstudyable: a quantitative literature review of proposed causes of corruption and how these have been studied

This thesis is a quantitative review of research on the causes of corruption. The aim is twofold: firstly to establish the degree of agreement between researchers regarding the causal effect of seven different explanatory dimensions on corruption. These explanatory dimensions are: economic liberalization, level of democracy, regime transitions, the strength of democratic traditions, the presence of a free media, level of economic development and natural resource dependency. I find that there is high agreement that economic liberalizations and regime transitions lead to more corruption. There is also high consensus that the presence of a free media and high economic development, respectively, lead to less. Concerning the effect of level of democracy, democratic traditions and natural resource dependency the findings are more diverse. About half of prior research concludes that level of democracy and stronger democratic traditions lead to less corruption. Also about half conclude that natural resource dependency leads to more corruption. The second aim of this thesis is to discover whether the disagreement between researchers can be explained by the data they have applied as operationalizations of corruption as the dependent variable. This is done through a series of logistic regressions, where the explanatory variables are the different data sources on corruption. These fall into the categories perceptions based cross-national data", experience based cross national data" and country-or region-specific studies". The results show that applying experience based cross national data gives significantly lower likelihood for concluding that higher economic development leads to less corruption. It also makes it less likely to conclude that natural resources lead to more corruption. Applying perceptions based cross national data in some instances provide higher likelihood for observing significant effects of the explanatory dimensions treated in this thesis and sometimes lower likelihood. An interesting finding is that the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index and studies conducted with country- or region specific foci agree" on the effects on corruption of all of the treated explanatory dimension where comparison is possible. This is counter to what is assumed based in theory.Master i Sammenliknende politikkSAMPOL350MASV-SAP

The New Politics of Patronage: The Arms Trade and Clientelism in the Arab World

In states without robust democratic institutions, public resources are often allocated on the basis of patronage. This distribution of patronage, along with the manipulation of official institutions (such as electoral systems and the judiciary) and the deployment of the coercive arms of the state provided the formula for authoritarian longevity in the Arab World. However, much regional scholarship continues to focus on the process through which patronage is distributed with little reference to how the underlying resources accrue to Arab regimes in the first place. Such studies fail to interrogate the organizational and financial interests of the external institutions (such as oil markets and aid organizations) that mediate this transfer of resources, and how those interests shape methods and patterns of resource distribution within Arab States. This paper is an attempt to identify some of these institutions and patterns by focusing on the array of patronage resources made available through the arms purchases executed by regional governments. The specific class of resources examined here is reciprocal investment contracts that U.S. defense firms negotiate with procuring country governments in order to facilitate arms sales, known in industry parlance as `defense offsets.' Procuring states design their own offset policies, including the amount of investment that foreign arms manufacturers are required to make and the domestic enterprises where those funds must be allocated. The procuring state's discretion over the process allows us to draw some conclusions about how these governments distribute offset investment to strengthen incumbents' patronage-based support networks. This analysis also reveals how U.S. defense firms are able to influence the negotiation process in order to secure their own financial benefits. By examining how defense firms and their customers in the Middle East collude to structure weapons contracts in order to generate offset agreements that are mutually beneficial, we gain a better understanding of how patronage politics operates in the contemporary regional context. We are likewise alerted to the subtle ways in which influential external actors can insinuate their own interests into the process, and how the interactions between these groups create ever-evolving new opportunities for patronage politics

Fighting Irrelevance: The Role of Regional Trade Agreements in International Production Networks in Asia

This publication brings together the main research outputs delivered under a common theme "Regional trade agreements and international production networks" of the Asia-Pacific Research and Training Network on Trade (ARTNeT) research programme, Phase II (2008-2010). The study was divided into three parts. The introduction to part I presents the research questions that were explored in the study and describes the structure of the book. Chaper 2 summarizes the literature on determinants for existence and evolution of global value chains and international production networks, the impact of changes in trade policy and, more specifically, regional trade liberalization. Chapter 3 provides a synthesis of the findings under each of the sectoral case studies in selected Asian countries: (a) the automobile industry in China, India and Indonesia; (b) the computer hard drive sector in Thailand; and (c) the textile and clothing sector in Bangladesh. Part II contains the sectoral papers (chapters 4 to 8). Part III focuses on identifying some recommendations to policymakers on how to approach trade liberalizatiion under regional trade agreements in order to benefit existing production networks and promote the development of new ones.trade liberalization, international production network, regional trade agreements, value chain, Asia, automotive, hard disk drive, textile and clothing

Aid and the symbiosis of global redistribution and development: Comparative historical lessons from two icons of development studies

This study examines the question of aid effectiveness through a comparative historical analysis of the external financing constraints of two icons of development studies: South Korea and Brazil. The selection of these contrasting cases is based on a method of difference, designed to examine the predicaments of two countries attempting similar developmentalist strategies of sustained industrial policy through successive stages of industrialization, but with differences in amounts of aid supporting such strategies. This approach differs from the standard approach in the literature of examining economic performance among aid recipient countries and it is adopted as a means to highlight the challenges that some of the most successful and advanced late industrialisers of the post-war era have faced in the absence of aid. The comparison draws on an analytical framework that locates aid effectiveness in the interaction of both aid absorption (via current accounts deficits) and development strategy (via industrial policy), the latter based on the premise that unconstrained strategies of post-war late industrialisation have exhibited inherent structural tendencies to generate merchandise trade deficits. The interaction establishes an important, yet mostly overlooked, symbiosis between global redistribution and development. This symbiosis is then demonstrated by the historical analysis of the external accounts of the two cases, which constitutes the original empirical contribution of the article given that inductive historical analysis of actual interactions between aid flows (or lack thereof) and external accounts has been essentially absent in the aid literature. Similarly, the literatures on industrial policy and developmental states tend to exhibit a domestic productionist bias that has also shunned serious analyses of the role of aid in supporting successful late industrialisation experiences. Accordingly, the case of South Korea clearly illustrates the crucial role that aid played in buttressing rapid late industrialisation against structural external constraints and financial vulnerabilities. The contrasting case of Brazil clearly demonstrates the constraints faced by late industrialising countries in the absence of generous supplies of aid and/or stable, secure and affordable finance. The conclusion reflects on some of the wider implications of these insights and also offers some comparative reflections on China as an alternative model for dealing with similar constraints