Country Role Models: Synthesis of Ireland, Japan and Switzerland

This paper provides a synthesis of the three papers on the non-Nordic developed economies, Ireland, Japan and Switzerland along the following themes: role of the state, openness, education and human capital, and macroeconomic stability. It then draws lessons for developing countries of today.economic growth, economic development, industrialization, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland

Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Preface)

This book provides the first systematic, integrated, analytical account of the evolution of the international economy during the last millennium. It emphasizes the two-way interaction between trade and geopolitics, and the importance of such interactions for world economic development.

Commodity Market Integration, 1500-2000

This paper provides a summary of what is known about trends in international commodity market integration during the second half of the second millennium. The range of goods which have been traded between continents since the Voyages of Discovery has steadily increased over time, and there has been substantial commodity market integration over the period, driven by technology in the 19th century and politics in the late 20th century. However, this trend towards greater market integration was not monotonic; it was periodically interrupted by shocks such as wars and world depressions, or by endogenous political responses to the distributional effects of globalization itself. In some periods politics has reinforced the effects of technology, while in other periods it has offset them. In several cases, severe shocks have had long-run effects on the international integration of commodity markets, as a result of politically induced hysteresis. Finally, we know remarkably little about international commodity market integration during the 20th century.

A political - economy analysis of free trade areas and customs unions

The authors analyze the welfare effects of regional integration in a model of endogenous protection. They show that introducing preferential trading leads to an increase in protection against countries outside the preferential trading area. Moreover, the important Meade result of preferential trading breaks down in the presence of endogenous protection. According to the Meade result, if excess demands exhibit net substitutability, the introduction of preferential trading is welfare-improving. In the presence of endogenous protection, because preferential trading is accompanied by increased protection against nonpartners, its effect on welfare is ambiguous. The authors also compare free trade areas and customs unions. They provide the first formal treatment of the argument that a customs union is a more effective instrument for diluting the power of interest groups than is a free trade area. Under a customs union, the tariff available to one country becomes available to all countries in the union. This introduces a free-rider problem in lobbying and all lobbying takes place in one country. The lobby chooses a lower (common) external tariff under a customs unions than under a free trade area. This means that welfare in the country where lobbying takes place is higher under a customs union than under a free trade area, although the same may not hold true for the other country. The level of the common external tariff declines as the number of members in the union increases. Therefore, the larger the number of partners in a customs union, the more likely it will improve the welfare of member countries. But, because of the free-rider problem, lobbies are likely to resist the enlargement of the customs union.TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Trade and Regional Integration,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy

The Philosophy of Locational Competition

"While Standortswettbewerb may be a familiar term in the German economics literature, with a long tradition in location theory going back to von Thunen and Losch, its English counterpart "locational competition" does not ring any bells, at least to me. One possible meaning, it would seem, is the choice of sites by firms at which to locate various production or marketing facilities to maximize their profits, given what their competitors are doing. It would thus constitute the geographical dimension of competition between oligopolists and as such would bring into play the full panoply of the location theorist's exotic arsenal of hexagons, isodapones, and whatever else have you. Somehow I do not think that this is what Professor Horst Siebert had in mind when he invited me to write a paper on this subject, which is the theme of our conference. What he appears to want us to understand by this phrase is rather competition between nations, not firms, to attract within their borders as much as possible of global pools of internationally mobile factors, thus raising the incomes of complementary immobile factors confined within those borders. In any case, this is the sense in which I will interpret the term in this paper.

Infrastructure, Human Capital, and International Trade

It is by now a trite commonplace that we live in an increasingly integrated global economy, in which the barriers to the free movement of goods and capital, though not labor, are rapidly disappearing as a result of both policy reforms and the progress of technology in transport and communications. The rhetoric as well as the substance of national economic policy is now preoccupied with the problem of how each country can hope to survive and prosper in a world where capital controls and trade restrictions are off the agenda. Is the simple laissez-faire principle of simply doing nothing correct, or is there anything an activist government might usefully strive to accomplish? With the global pool of capital at any instant restlessly searching for the highest return, regardless of borders, a popular prescription has come to be the provision of public infrastructure and the training and education of the labor force. With these measures the nation can attempt to secure for itself a higher share of the global capital stock and thus ensure for itself higher wages and better quality jobs for its own labor force

Towards A Model of Territorial Expansion and the limits of empire

"The question of the size of political units never seems to attract among historians and sociologists the attention which it deserves. What determines why states and empires have expanded to the limits which they have historically achieved? What are the conditions under which it has been possible to maintain those frontiers? Why have the larger states normally broken up into fragments after a certain period of time? As a general problem—distinct from the specific question of why particular units have disintegrated—this is still largely unexplored territory.

Notes on the Political Economy of Nationalism

"The resurgence of nationalism all over the world in the last few years can be said to arise, in every case, from a lack of congruence between "state" and "nation." While each of these terms is highly complex and controversial, we all know the main difference between them. The state is a political and administrative unit, claiming the "monopoly of the legitimate use of force" over all the inhabitants of a given territory. The nation, on the other hand, is an "imagined community," including the dead and the unborn, who are bound together by the ties of kinship, language, custom and shared myths that separate it from other similar collectivities.-7 Thus we can have a nation without a state, as in the case of the Kurds, or states that comprise many nations, such as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, and a nation divided between several states, as in the case of the Italians and Germans before unification in the nineteenth century, or the two Germanys and two Koreas of more recent history.