The New Global Rulers Büthe, Tim; Mattli, Walter
2011., 20110228, 2011, 2011-02-28, 20110101, c2011
eBook
Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule making has been ...motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. The New Global Rulers examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses--and why.
International trade agreements lead to more foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. This article examines the causal mechanisms underpinning this trade-investment linkage by asking ...whether institutional features of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which allow governments to make more credible commitments to protect foreign investments, indeed result in greater FDI. The authors explore three institutional differences. First, they examine whether PTAs that have entered into force lead to greater FDI than PTAs that have merely been negotiated and signed, since only the former constitute a binding commitment under international law. Second, they ask whether trade agreements that have investment clauses lead to greater FDI. Third, they consider whether PTAs with dispute-settlement mechanisms lead to greater FDI. Analyses of FDI flows into 122 developing countries from 1971 to 2007 show that trade agreements that include stronger mechanisms for credible commitment induce more FDI. Institutional diversity in international agreements matters.
Background:
The global distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations remains highly unequal. We examine public preferences in six European countries regarding the allocation of COVID-19 vaccines between the ...Global South and Global North.
Methods:
We conducted online discrete choice experiments with adult participants in France (n=766), Germany (n=1964), Italy (n=767), Poland (n=670), Spain (n=925), and Sweden (n=938). Respondents were asked to decide which one of two candidates should receive the vaccine first. The candidates varied on four attributes: age, mortality risk, employment, and living in a low- or high-income country. We analysed the relevance of each attribute in allocation decisions using conditional logit regressions.
Results:
In all six countries, respondents prioritised candidates with a high mortality and infection risk, irrespective of whether the candidate lived in the respondent’s own country. All else equal, respondents in Italy, France, Spain, and Sweden gave priority to a candidate from a low-income country, whereas German respondents were significantly more likely to choose the candidate from their own country. Female, younger, and more educated respondents were more favourable to an equitable vaccine distribution.
Conclusions:
Given these preferences for global solidarity, European governments should promote vaccine transfers to poorer world regions.
Funding:
Funding was provided by the European Union’s Horizon H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 101016233 (PERISCOPE).
Social scientists interested in explaining historical processes can, indeed should, refuse the choice between modeling causal relationships and studying history. Identifying temporality as the ...defining characteristic of processes that can be meaningfully distinguished as “history,” I show that modeling such phenomena engenders particular difficulties but is both possible and fruitful. Narratives, as a way of presenting empirical information, have distinctive strengths that make them especially suited for historical scholarship, and structuring the narratives based on the model allows us to treat them as data on which to test the model. At the same time, this use of narratives raises methodological problems not identified in recent debates. I specify these problems, analyze their implications, and suggest ways of solving or minimizing them. There is no inherent incompatibility between—but much potential gain from—modeling history and using historical narratives as data.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catastrophic event that has seriously endangered the world's population. Governments have largely been unprepared to deal with such an unprecedented calamity, ...partially due to the lack of sufficient or adequately fine-grained data necessary for forecasting the pandemic's evolution. To fill this gap, researchers worldwide have been collecting data about different aspects of COVID-19's evolution and government responses to them so as to provide the foundation for informative models and tools that can be used to mitigate the current pandemic and possibly prevent future ones. Indeed, since the early stages of the pandemic, a number of research initiatives were launched with this goal, including the PERISCOPE (Pan-European Response to the ImpactS of COVID-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics) Project, funded by the European Commission. PERISCOPE aims to investigate the broad socio-economic and behavioral impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the goal of making Europe more resilient and prepared for future large-scale risks. The purpose of this study, carried out as part of the PERISCOPE project, is to provide a first European-level analysis of the effect of government policies on the spread of the virus. To do so, we assessed the relationship between a novel index, the Policy Intensity Index, and four epidemiological variables collected by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and then applied a comprehensive Pan-European population model based on Multilevel Vector Autoregression. This model aims at identifying effects that are common to some European countries while treating country-specific policies as covariates, explaining the different evolution of the pandemic in nine selected countries due to data availability: Spain, France, Netherlands, Latvia, Slovenia, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia. Results show that specific policies' effectiveness tend to vary consistently within the different countries, although in general policies related to Health Monitoring and Health Resources are the most effective for all countries.
We conduct a large (N = 6567) online experiment to measure the features of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that citizens of six European countries perceive to lower the risk of transmission ...of SARS-Cov-2 the most. We collected data in Bulgaria (n = 1069), France (n = 1108), Poland (n = 1104), Italy (n = 1087), Spain (n = 1102) and Sweden (n = 1097). Based on the features of the most widely adopted public health guidelines to reduce SARS-Cov-2 transmission (mask wearing vs not, outdoor vs indoor contact, short vs 90 min meetings, few vs many people present, and physical distancing of 1 or 2 m), we conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to estimate the public's perceived risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in scenarios that presented mutually exclusive constellations of these features. Our findings indicate that participants' perception of transmission risk was most influenced by the NPI attributes of mask-wearing and outdoor meetings and the least by NPI attributes that focus on physical distancing, meeting duration, and meeting size. Differentiating by country, gender, age, cognitive style (reflective or intuitive), and perceived freight of COVID-19 moreover allowed us to identify important differences between subgroups. Our findings highlight the importance of improving health policy communication and citizens' health literacy about the design of NPIs and the transmission risk of SARS-Cov-2 and potentially future viruses.
The flow of foreign direct investment into developing countries varies greatly across countries and over time. The political factors that affect these flows are not well understood. Focusing on the ...relationship between trade and investment, we argue that international trade agreements-GATT/WTO and preferential trade agreements (PTAs)-provide mechanisms for making commitments to foreign investors about the treatment of their assets, thus reassuring investors and increasing investment. These international commitments are more credible than domestic policy choices, because reneging on them is more costly. Statistical analyses for 122 developing countries from 1970 to 2000 support this argument. Developing countries that belong to the WTO and participate in more PTAs experience greater FDI inflows than otherwise, controlling for many factors including domestic policy preferences and taking into account possible endogeneity. Joining international trade agreements allows developing countries to attract more FDI and thus increase economic growth.
Over recent decades governments have increasingly delegated domestic and international regulatory functions to private‐sector agents. This article examines the reasons for such delegation and how ...private agents differ from public ones, and then analyzes the politics of regulation post delegation. It argues that the key difference between delegation to a public agent and delegation to a private one is that in the latter case a multiple‐principals problem emerges that is qualitatively different from the one usually considered in the literature. An agent's action will be determined by the relative tightness of competing principal–agent relationships. This tightness is a function of the relative importance of each principal for the agent's financial and operational viability as well as its effectiveness in rule making. Further, the article posits that exogenous changes in the macro‐political climate can deeply affect the nature of principal–agent relationships. The authors test their hypotheses about the politics of regulation in the postdelegation period through the study of accounting standards setting in the United States, a case of delegation of regulatory authority to a private agent that goes back to the New Deal era and has received renewed public attention in the wake of recent corporate financial scandals.
This special issue examines the consequences of the ongoing power transition in the world economy for global regulatory regimes, especially the variation in rising powers' transition from rule-takers ...to rule-makers in global markets. This introductory article presents the analytical framework for better understanding those consequences, the Power Transition Theory of Global Economic Governance (PTT-GEG), which extends the scope of traditional power transition theory to conflict and cooperation in the international political economy and global regulatory governance. PTT-GEG emphasizes variation in the institutional strength of the regulatory state as the key conduit through which the growing market size of the emergent economies gives their governments leverage in global regulatory regimes. Whether or not a particular rising power, for a particular regulatory issue, invests its resources in building a strong regulatory state, however, is a political choice, requiring an analysis of the interplay of domestic and international politics that fuels or inhibits the creation of regulatory capacity and capability. PTT-GEG further emphasizes variation in the extent to which rising powers' substantive, policy-specific preferences diverge from the established powers' preferences as enshrined in the regulatory status quo. Divergence should not be assumed as given. Distinct combinations of these two variables yield, for each regulatory regime, distinct theoretical expectations about how the power transition in the world economy will affect global economic governance, helping us identify the conditions under which rule-takers will become regime-transforming rule-makers, regime-undermining rule-breakers, resentful rule-fakers, or regime-strengthening rule-promoters, as well as the conditions under which they remain weakly regime-supporting rule-takers.
When rapid economic growth catapults a country within a few years from the margins of the global economy to middle power status, does global regulatory governance need to brace for a challenge to the ...status quo? To answer this question, we extend the power transition theory of global economic governance to middle powers: A rising middle power should be expected to challenge the international regulatory status quo only if increasing issue‐specific strength of its regulatory state coincides with preferences that diverge from the preferences of the established powers, which are enshrined in the status quo. We examine this argument empirically, focusing on South Korea in the realm of competition law and policy. We find that South Korea, a non‐participant in the international competition regime until the 1980s, developed in the 1990s substantial regulatory capacity and capability and thus “spoiler potential.” At the same time, however, its policy preferences converged upon the norms and practices established by the United States and the European Union, albeit with some distinct elements. Under these conditions, we expect a transition from rule‐taker to rule‐promoter. We find that South Korea has indeed in recent years begun to actively promote well‐established competition law and policy norms and practices – supplemented by its distinct elements – through technical assistance programs, as well as various bilateral channels and multilateral institutions. The findings suggest that the power transition theory of global economic governance is usefully applicable to middle powers, too.
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