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371. Latin American Resource Populism in the Early 21st Century

Author:
Marten Brienen
Publication Date:
04-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University
Abstract:
Latin America seems out of step with the world, as it appears to be currently emerging from a cycle of populist rule commonly referred to as the Pink Tide, which began with the inauguration of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in 1999. While observers have been declaring the end of the Pink Tide for a few years now, the reality is that the movement is not quite dead yet: Nicolás Maduro remains in power, as does Evo Morales – who appears not quite ready to throw in the towel. While Rafael Correa has stepped aside in perfectly democratic fashion, his successor, Lenín Moreno, is very much a believer in what has been termed “twenty-first century socialism.” In this article, I will focus on the more outspoken of the members of the Pink Tide, and suggest that within the resurgence of the left in Latin America there is a distinct subset of populists who have married resource nationalism to populism to produce something altogether separate from the rest of the members of the Pink Tide.
Topic:
Economics, Politics, Natural Resources, and Populism
Political Geography:
South America and Latin America

372. Trump and Energy Security: Revival of an Old Concept?

Author:
Petra Dolata
Publication Date:
01-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
While some of the announcements and approaches to energy by Donald Trump may sound like familiar stories of energy security, they are significantly different. Any discussion on energy security is driven by an inward-looking perspective, which highlights the economic dimension of creating jobs while tapping into a discourse that emphasizes America’s greatness.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Energy Policy, and Job Creation
Political Geography:
United States and North America

373. The Role of Universities in Our Changing Economy

Author:
Jefferey Bleich
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Ambassador's Review
Institution:
Council of American Ambassadors
Abstract:
We grew up in a century defined by the Second Industrial Revolution. Today, that revolution is being eclipsed by a Digital Revolution. The uncertainty that we are experiencing in every aspect of our society is the same disorientation that occurred between 1870 and 1910 when the first Industrial Revolution ended and a second one began. It eventually vaulted nations like America and Australia to the top of the world order. But it also produced the Gilded Age, labor unrest, mass migrations, the Great Depression and two world wars. That era is closing, and we are now experiencing the new great dis­ruption that Silicon Valley promised. Digital technology—while solving crucial problems—is creating or compounding others. It has outstripped the capacity of government to control it and amplified the collapse of public confidence in democratic governments. It has inflamed rivalries between those who benefit and those who don’t. It has undermined standards—of altruism and of civility—that are necessary for us to find common ground. To appreciate this, we have to see where we’ve come from. A hundred and fifty years ago, we went through the same thing. Changes in technology revolutionized media, global integration and demographics. The changes were profound. In 1879, during a three-month period, both the electric light and a workable internal combustion engine were invented. Those two inventions alone produced over the next 40 years a dizzying number of new technologies. The telephone, phonograph, motion pictures, cars, airplanes, elevators, X-rays, electric machinery, consumer appliances, highways, suburbs and supermarkets—all were created in a 40-year burst from 1875 to 1915. Technology fundamentally transformed how people live. We’ve known for a while that the structures created by this Second Industrial Revolution were running their course, at least in advanced economies, and that it was being replaced by a new revolution, the digital revolution. Recently, the pace of these advances has started to build exponen­tially, and the pressure has been mounting. Everyone who has had to throw out their CD player for a DVD player for an iPod for an iPhone for Spotify knows what I mean. Further, the pace at which our world is being changed just keeps accelerating. Every year a new massive theory of disruption emerges: “the digital economy,” “the social network,” “the Internet of things,” “sharing economy” and “big data.” Last year, “machine learning”—where machines teach themselves things we do not know—was the buzzword. The word in Silicon Valley this year is “singularity”—where our species itself is altered by technology (gene-editing, bionics, artificial intelligence), creating a new hybrid species.
Topic:
Economics, Education, Digital Economy, Higher Education, and Digital Revolution
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, Australia, and North America

374. Iraq: Years of Post-Saddam Internal and External Developments

Author:
Pavlo Ignatiev
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
AUSTRAL: Brazilian Journal of Strategy International Relations
Institution:
Postgraduate Program in International Strategic Studies, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Abstract:
Iraqis very important for the world community because of its strategic position at the crossroads between the Persian Gulf, theMideteraneanSeaand theRed Seaalong with huge oil and mineral wealth. Moreover, Iraqi case illustrates all aspects of the US Middle Eastern policy since the end of the Cold War. The article analyses political and economic processes in Iraq after the demise of Saddam Hussain’s regime, evaluates the efficiency of post-war reconstruction of this Arab country in security and economic fields, singles out the reasons behind the civil war between Sunni and Shia followers, explains the paradox of semi-independent status of Iraqi Kurdistan as well as foreign policy of official Baghdad towards important neighbours – Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The rise of Islamic State of Iraq andLevantcapitalizing on sectarian devide and an attempt of Iraqi leadership to neutralize this threat also has become the part of analyzis.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Violent Extremism, and Islamic State
Political Geography:
Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Middle East, Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan

375. Progress and Implications of the China-Korea FTA

Author:
Li Si-qi, Tu Xin-quan, and Liu Bin
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:
The article focuses on the China-Korea FTA, analyzing the background of China-Korea bilateral economic relations, the characteristics of the China-Korea FTA and more importantly, the implications and future prospect of this free trade pact. So far, the China-Korea FTA is considered to be the most comprehensive compared with China's previous FTAs and may be the largest in trade terms among all the FTAs concluded by Korea and China, playing a positive role in advancing economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region. However, with lots of exceptions to tariff elimination and market access, as well as a 20-year transition period, the present version of the China-Korea FTA is far from the best in terms of the depth of liberalization and the scope of obligations on trade and investment rules. The recent bilateral diplomatic tensions due to the decision of deploying the THAAD missile system by the Korean government may also jeopardize bilateral economic ties between China and Korea, and further increase uncertainties of the China-Korea FTA. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese and Korean governments will handle this issue smoothly under the present sensitive political atmosphere and achieve substantial progress in follow-up FTA negotiations on services and investment.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Economics, Bilateral Relations, and Regional Integration
Political Geography:
China, Asia, South Korea, and Korea

376. Korea's Economic Relations with Japan

Author:
Kim Gyu-Pan
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:
Korea's economic relations with Japan, which were re-established as a result of the diplomatic normalization between the two countries in 1965, have transformed from dependent to interdependent. The extraordinary economic growth that Korea accomplished during the post-war period was largely due to intermediate goods imported from Japan, and technical cooperation and joint ventures with Japanese enterprises. However, in the 21st century, the dependence of Korean firms on Japanese technology has somewhat declined as global enterprises have appeared in Korea. In contrast to the post-war economic boom, Japanese companies now prefer to cooperate with their Korean counterparts, resulting in joint business ventures between Korean and Japanese firms being continuously developed. This reversal in the economic ties between Korea and Japan can be attributed to several reasons including: the rise of China; Japan's two lost decades; and Korea's push for domestic structural reform as well as economic globalization after the Asian Currency Crisis of 1997. Nonetheless, the issue of Korea's trade imbalance with Japan, which was established during the post-war period, still remains thereby serving as a serious impediment to FTA negotiations between Korea and Japan as well as Korea's TPP negotiations.
Topic:
Economics, History, Bilateral Relations, and Trade
Political Geography:
Japan, Asia, South Korea, and Korea

377. Present Conditions of North Korean Industry and Possible Reconstruction Plans

Author:
Lim Soo-ho and Hong Seok-ki
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:
Since the collapse of industry during the 'Arduous March' (1995-1997), Pyongyang has continuously launched reconstruction plans but has failed to see a rebound. The key is to restore industrial linkages; however, the DPRK allocated a majority of state investment to the defense industry under the 'Military First Economic Policy.' As long as the 'strategic sector' retains priority, a sound outcome seems to be out of reach. In reality, North Korea's comparative advantage lies on labor-intensive business, with abundant labor forces at a low cost. After unification, such industries will have bright prospects with technology and capital not only from South Korea, but also from China and Japan. The economic integration scenario of the two Koreas -- whether radical or gradual -- will decide industrial policies for the upper half of the peninsula in the post-unification era.
Topic:
Economics, Science and Technology, History, Reconstruction, and Industry
Political Geography:
Japan, China, Asia, South Korea, North Korea, and Korea

378. Targeting credit through community members

Author:
Diego A. Vera-Cossio
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD)
Abstract:
Delegating the allocation of public resources to community members is an increasingly popular form of delivering development programs and are associated with a tradeoff between improved information about potential beneficiaries and favoritism towards local elites. Unlike targeting cash transfers to the poor, the optimal targeting of credit is a more complex problem involving issues of productivity, repayment, and market responses: This paper analyzes this problem using a large-scale lending program, the Thai Million Baht Credit Fund, which decentralizes the allocation of loans to an elected group of community members, and provides three main results. First, exploiting a long and detailed panel, I recover pre-program structural estimates of household total factor productivity and find that resources from the program were not allocated to high-productivity, poor households, which is inconsistent with poverty and productive efficiency as targeting criteria. Second, using socioeconomic networks data, I show that actual targeting is strongly driven by connections to village elites and is related to lower program profitability, which suggests favoritism as a reason for mistargeting. Finally, I exploit quasi-experimental variation in the rollout of the program and uncover evidence that, in general equilibrium, informal credit markets compensate for targeting distortions by redirecting credit towards unconnected households, albeit at higher interest rates than those provided by the program. The results highlight the limitations of community-driven approaches to program delivery and the role of markets in attenuating potential targeting errors.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Microcredit, Public Sector, Local, Microeconomics, and Credit
Political Geography:
Thailand

379. Outliers in semi-parametric Estimation of Treatment Effects

Author:
Darwin Ugarte Ontiveros, Gustavo Canavire-Bacarreza, and Luis Castro Peñarrieta
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD)
Abstract:
Average treatment effects estimands can present significant bias under the presence of outliers. Moreover, outliers can be particularly hard to detect, creating bias and inconsistency in the semi-parametric ATE estimads. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that semi-parametric methods, such as matching, are biased in the presence of outliers. Bad and good leverage points outliers are considered. The bias arises because bad leverage points completely change the distribution of the metrics used to define counterfactuals. Whereas good leverage points increase the chance of breaking the common support condition and distort the balance of the covariates and which may push practitioners to misspecify the propensity score. We provide some clues to diagnose the presence of outliers and propose a reweighting estimator that is robust against outliers based on the Stahel-Donoho multivariate estimator of scale and location. An application of this estimator to LaLonde’s (1986) data allows us to explain the Dehejia and Wahba (2002) and Smith and Todd (2005) debate on the inability of matching estimators to deal with the evaluation problem.
Topic:
Economics, Econometrics, Methods, and Counterfactuals
Political Geography:
Global

380. Korean Firms' Sustainability Practices and Their Role in the Green Economy

Author:
Younsung Kim
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:
Companies in industrialized nations have embraced environmental protection and sustainability as part of their international competitive strategies. The trend toward proactive environmental management has also grown in Korean firms, as consumers, investors, local policy networks, and the Lee Myung-bak administration’s green growth policy initiatives have provided an impetus for the greening of South Korean firms. However, despite heightened firm interest in environmental responsibility, there is little understanding of which types of sustainable activities Korean firms have implemented. Analyzing sustainability reports from 30 large Korean firms, this study finds that Korean firms are more likely to employ lower-order sustainability practices that can help prevent pollution and modify existing processes and products to reduce environmental impact. However, their focus on innovating clean technologies seems to be limited. To transition to a low-carbon, green economy, the Korean government should consider green growth policies that foster firms’ investments in higher-order sustainability strategies and scale up corporate sustainability more broadly in the Korean business community.
Topic:
Economics, Energy Policy, Environment, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, and Domestic Policy
Political Geography:
Asia, South Korea, and Korea