The Transformation of World Trade

This Article contests the traditional view of the evolution of the world trade system. Rather than a unidirectional process of legalization focused exclusively on the system\u27s normative structure, Part I of the Article, The Explosion of the GATT Club, recounts the transformation from GATT to WTO as a bidirectional interaction between law and politics; in particular, between the system\u27s legal-normative structure and its political, decision making branch Part II of this Article, The Threat of a WTO Fortress, challenges the view that a choice must be made between politics and law or, put differently, between, on the one hand, democratic representation, participation, contestation, and the inherent flexibility that comes with it and, on the other hand, discipline, pre-commitment, and some degree of government by experts or export driven interests shielded from capture and popular ignorance. On the contrary, my claim is that a legitimate and efficient trading system requires both politics and law, or more particularly, appropriate balances between participation and discipline, flexibility and pre-commitment, accountability and insulation, popular support and expertise, and input and output legitimacy

On the determinants of cooperative public good provision

This dissertation aims at identifying determinants of cooperative public good provision in dynamic frameworks. We develop political economy based models of fiscal federalism and establish normative benchmarks as well as equilibrium predictions for both policy-making under a centralized and decentralized regime. In the tradition of Oates' (1972) seminal fiscal federalism treatise, our models analyze the regimes' pros and cons for various facets of institutional policy-making. Yet, placing emphasis on the dynamic structures of policy-making, we introduce guidelines for policy assignment to layers of a federal system in repeated game settings. The bottom line for this thesis is to analyze the impact of factors like public good spillovers, regional preference heterogeneity, and the number of federal member states on the regime-specific ability to yield efficient public good policies. Let us illustrate the thread of this dissertation. Chapter 2 starts with a representation of the genuine fiscal federalism framework à la Oates (1972). The literature survey in section 2.1 classifies and highlights some contributions that can be related to Oates' work. Section 2.2 illustrates the basic normative guidelines for policy assignment, for instance the celebrated decentralization theorem, in a formal framework. Chapter 3 introduces our political economy framework and analyzes the optimal assignment of spillover policies in an economy with 2 regions. Our static perspective (section 3.3) confirms the above-mentioned standard fiscal federalism result, in particular the positive correlation between spillovers and the optimal degree of centralization. Allowing for dynamic interaction, this very guideline for policy assignment is, though, reversed in section 3.4 as efficient public good policies are then easier to sustain under a decentralized (centralized) regime in case spillovers are large (small). Chapter 4 applies the framework of chapter 3 to a setting with interregional preference heterogeneity. As a major result, both regimes fail to yield efficiency-sustaining cooperation in the repeated game setting if the regional preferences for public goods differ substantially. Chapter 5 extends the basic framework to a n-region economy, thus enabling us to analyze the impact of federal enlargements on the prospects of attaining efficiency. Varying the degree of spillovers as well as the type of public good funding, we apply the extended basic framework to different problems of public good allocation. In each case, enlargements induce two countervailing effects on the ability to maintain efficiency in a federal legislature. Yet, cooperation necessarily breaks down in large legislatures whereas, at the same time, efficiency can be sustained at the decentral layer. At last, chapter 6 endogenizes the very impact of repeated interaction on cooperation by allowing for (political) decision makers that face strategy-contingent re-election probabilities. Concluding our determinants of efficient public good provision, we show that cooperation can, quite generally, be attained if politicians face a high likeliness of joint future interaction. Chapter 7 summarizes our results

International Multilateral Negotiation: Approaches to the Management of Complexity

In a single volume, a team of distinguished international scholars draws on a wide range of social science theory to explain the dynamics of bargaining and diplomacy when many parties and many issues are involved. Each contributor explores a different approach to reaching successful agreements among diverse governments, multinational corporations, and other international actors. To show how these approaches work in actual practice, the authors provide detailed analyses of two multilateral negotiations -- the Uruguay round of negotiations under the General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the negotiations leading to the Single European Act consolidating the European Community. The book provides the tools for analyzing and managing the complexities of multilateral negotiations including: How the roots of conflict, the distribution of power, and specific patterns of resistance and cooperation affect all stages of negotiation. How game theory, multi-attribute utility models, and other practical tools can be used to chart interests and identify strategic trade-offs before negotiations. How negotiation is organization in action, applying the rules and culture of organizations to change through a cybernetic process. How insights in to the way small groups function can help advance negotiations. Why different modes of leadership are needed to diagnose multinational problems, clarify options, and develop feasible solutions. How and why coalitions are formed -- and how they can promt meaningful bargaining and help forge positive, lasting agreements

Vers des modes de scrutin moins manipulables

We study coalitional manipulation of voting systems: can a subset of voters, by voting strategically, elect a candidate they all prefer to the candidate who would have won if all voters had voted truthfully? From a theoretical point of view, we develop a formalism which makes it possible to study all voting systems, whether the ballots are orders of preference on the candidates (ordinal systems), ratings or approval values (cardinal systems), or even more general objects. We show that for almost all classical voting systems, their manipulability can be strictly reduced by adding a preliminary test aiming to elect the Condorcet winner if there is one. For the other voting systems, we define the generalized Condorcification which leads to similar results. Then we define the notion of decomposable culture, an assumption of which the probabilistic independence of voters is a special case. Under this assumption, we prove that, for each voting system, there exists a voting system which is ordinal, shares certain properties with the original voting system, and is at most as manipulable. Thus, the search for a voting system of minimal manipulability (in a class of reasonable systems) can be restricted to those which are ordinal and satisfy the Condorcet criterion. In order to allow everyone to examine these phenomena in practice, we present SVVAMP, a Python package of our own dedicated to the study of voting systems and their manipulability. Then we use it to compare the coalitional manipulability of various voting systems in several types of cultures, i.e. probabilistic models that generate populations of voters equipped with random preferences. We then complete the analysis with elections from real experiments. Finally, we determine the voting systems with minimal manipulability for very low values of the number of voters and of the number of candidates, and we compare them with the classical voting systems of the literature. In general, we establish that Borda's method, Range voting, and Approval voting are particularly manipulable. Conversely, we show the excellent resistance to manipulation of the system called IRV, also known as STV, and of its variant Condorcet-IRV.Nous étudions la manipulation par coalition des modes de scrutin: est-ce qu'un sous-ensemble des électeurs, en votant de façon stratégique, peut faire élire un candidat qu'ils préfèrent tous au candidat qui aurait été vainqueur si tous les électeurs avaient voté sincèrement? D'un point de vue théorique, nous développons un formalisme qui permet d'étudier tous les modes de scrutin, que les bulletins soient des ordres de préférences sur les candidats (systèmes ordinaux), des notes ou des valeurs d'approbation (systèmes cardinaux) ou des objets encore plus généraux. Nous montrons que pour la quasi-totalité des modes de scrutin classiques, on peut réduire strictement leur manipulabilité en ajoutant un test préliminaire visant à élire le vainqueur de Condorcet s'il en existe un. Pour les autres modes de scrutin, nous définissons la condorcification généralisée qui permet d'obtenir des résultats similaires. Puis nous définissons la notion de culture décomposable, une hypothèse dont l'indépendance probabiliste des électeurs est un cas particulier. Sous cette hypothèse, nous prouvons que, pour tout mode de scrutin, il existe un mode de scrutin qui est ordinal, qui partage certaines propriétés avec le mode de scrutin original et qui est au plus aussi manipulable. Ainsi, la recherche d'un mode de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale (dans une classe de systèmes raisonnables) peut être restreinte à ceux qui sont ordinaux et vérifient le critère de Condorcet. Afin de permettre à tous d'examiner ces phénomènes en pratique, nous présentons SVVAMP, un package Python de notre cru dédié à l'étude des modes de scrutin et de leur manipulabilité. Puis nous l'utilisons pour comparer la manipulabilité par coalition de divers modes de scrutin dans plusieurs types de cultures, c'est-à-dire des modèles probabilistes permettant de générer des populations d'électeurs munis de préférences aléatoires. Nous complétons ensuite l'analyse avec des élections issues d'expériences réelles. Enfin, nous déterminons les modes de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale pour de très faibles valeurs du nombre d'électeurs et du nombre de candidats et nous les comparons avec les modes de scrutin classiques. De manière générale, nous établissons que la méthode de Borda, le vote par notation et le vote par assentiment sont particulièrement manipulables. À l'inverse, nous montrons l'excellente résistance à la manipulation du système appelé VTI, également connu par son acronyme anglophone STV ou IRV, et de sa variante Condorcet-VTI

The role of fiscal rules and institutions in shaping budgetary outcomes

The Workshop "The role of fiscal rules and institutions in shaping budgetary outcomes" organized by the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial affairs of the European Commission on 24 November 2006 in Brussels aimed at enriching the debate on the fiscal arrangements and improving the understanding of their functioning. This Economic Paper contains all the paper presented in this event that was organised in four sessions. A first set of papers mainly focus on the impact of numerical fiscal rules on budgetary outturns. Other paper deal primarily with the appropriate design of fiscal rules and institutions. An additional group of papers addresses the relationship between the fiscal governance approach adopted by the EU Member States and their institutional and political frameworks. Finally the remaining presentations relate more directly to policy experiences. fiscal rules, budget, institutions.fiscal rules, budget, institutions, Ayuso-i-Casals, Deroose, Flores, Moulin

Essays in Public Economics

This thesis consists of four independent chapters which are linked in several aspects: All chapters contribute to the theory of public economics. From a theoretical point of view, all chapters are based on the assumption that agents are privately informed about their preferences, and all chapters use mechanism design theory. Yet their applications vary and cover topics such as public good provision, externality regulation and income taxation. The first three chapters form an entity as they use the independent private values model. Chapter 4 uses robust mechanism design. Chapter 1 studies the independent private values model in mechanism design, applied to the problem of bilateral trade and public good provision. It provides conditions under which a model with a large but discrete number of types behaves qualitatively in the same way as a model with a continuum of types. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the problem of externality regulation. I consider firms that can reduce externalities, which is beneficial to consumers. Firms have private information about their costs, and consumers have private information about their preferences. Chapter 2 investigates optimal price instruments (e.g. taxes) and quantity instruments (e.g. tradable permits). These two instruments are frequently used to regulate externalities such as CO2-emissions, acid rain and water pollution. Both instruments are contrasted with the optimal unconstrained mechanism to regulate externalities. Chapter 3 addresses the question how externalities should be regulated when distributional concerns and efficiency are considered. If stronger weight is put on consumers in the regulator's welfare function, lower emission reduction takes place than when the regulator is interested in jointly maximizing consumer surplus and firm profits. Chapter 4 varies in that it allows preferences to be different from selfish. It is a contribution to the theory of robust mechanism design, taking into account findings of experimental research. More precisely, it describes how mechanisms can be designed that are not only robust with respect to variations in beliefs but as well to deviations from standard preferences

Law School Announcements 2000-2001

Officers and Faculty The Law School - History Programs of Instruction Curriculum Student Activities and Organizations Funds and Endowmentshttps://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/lawschoolannouncements/1124/thumbnail.jp