Search

Begin New Search Topic International Trade and Finance Publication Year within 25 Years

2191. Cultural Diversity and Economic Convergence: The Dialectics of Canadian Cultural Policy

Author:
Sabine Milz
Publication Date:
07-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Through an examination of the Canadian book and magazine sectors and the major international trade agreements to which Canada is a signatory, the paper interrogates the shortcomings of Canadian cultural policy's attempt at reconciling the realities of global capitalism with the Romantic ideal of non-commodified, non-economic national culture. The discussion highlights the contradictions involved in current policy attempts to protect a uniquely “Canadian culture” in an era of globalisation in which national cultures seem to increasingly disintegrate and give way to mass cultural expression. Moreover, it probes the policy terms for an economised reformulation of Canadian culture, which means a discursive and material, localised and globalised way of conceptualising the dynamics of Canadian cultural expression.
Topic:
Civil War, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, Nationalism, and Arts
Political Geography:
Canada

2192. Mortgage Default Insurance in the U.S.: Implications for Russia

Author:
Raymond Struyk and Douglas E. Whiteley
Publication Date:
03-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Urban Institute
Abstract:
The objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of mortgage default insurance as developed in the United States into the context of Russian mortgage lending. The first part of the paper discusses the broad principles and operations of mortgage default insurance offered by private companies as it works in the United States. The pricing of this product and the preconditions for offering such insurance are highlighted. The second section outlines the operation of the U.S. government-supported default insurance offered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The final part applies the foregoing information to the situation in Russia today and concludes that the conditions necessary for launching mortgage default insurance do not currently exist in the country. Nevertheless, there are a number of essential actions that can and should be taken over the next several months to put Russia on the road to establishing such insurance in a few years. The paper finishes with a possible action plan for the next two years.
Topic:
Development, Government, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, and Asia

2193. Regulatory Europeanization, National Autonomy and Regulatory Effectiveness: Marketing Authorization for Pharmaceuticals

Author:
Jürgen Feick
Publication Date:
11-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The EC harmonized market entry regulation for pharmaceuticals from the early sixties on, but it achieved neither its goal of uniform national regulatory decisions nor that of automatic mutual recognition. Subsequent attempts to Europeanize the procedures themselves resulted in two alternatives in 1995: a Centralized Procedure for innovative pharmaceutical products implemented at the EU level, and a Decentralized Procedure which tries to assure mutual recognition. First, the paper analyzes the distinctive modes of Europeanization employed in these regulatory alternatives, examining both their impact on the effectiveness of European governing and the balance they strike between European interventionism, national participation and national autonomy. Second, it tries to assess whether Europeanization furthers the goals of pharmaceutical market entry policy as defined in European regulations – public health protection, creation of a single market and the reduction of regulatory costs to industry. There is little evidence that the public's health is less well protected when regulation is Europeanized. Only the Centralized Procedure contributes significantly to the goal of establishing a single market. Regulatory costs in terms of approval time did go down especially for pharmaceutical firms using the Centralized Procedure, mainly because of efficiency-enhancing legal provisions and institutionally induced regulatory competition between national authorities.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
Europe

2194. Business Interest Representation and European Commission Fora: A Game Theoretic Investigation

Author:
Andreas Broscheid and David Coen
Publication Date:
07-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The relationship between business and the EU institutions has evolved from its corporatist origins into a complex elite pluralist arrangement centered around industrial fora and policy committees. We view the growth of forum politics as the direct consequence of the unprecedented boom in economic and public interest lobbying in the early 1990s: While the increase in European interest representation provided greater legitimacy for the European integration program, it put a strain on the existing open pluralist European business-government relationship. One of the European Commission's (EC) informal solutions was to create restricted-entry policy fora and select committees, which it hoped would provide fast and reliable decision-making. Employing a formal model of industrial fora and committees, we specify the mechanisms that we believe caused the establishment of the current elite pluralist system of interest representation in the EU. We argue that in the process of establishing selective-entry fora for interest representation, the European Commission acted not only as policy entrepreneur, but also as a political entrepreneur, fostering collective action.
Topic:
Government, International Trade and Finance, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe

2195. Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to the New Determinism

Author:
Colin Crouch and Henry Farrell
Publication Date:
06-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have difficulty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which path dependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can be argued that actors will be able to use these when they perceive a need to change. This article seeks to capture this possibility through accommodating a Bayesian parametric decision maker, interacting with an environment. This makes it possible to examine how change may involve such processes as: the use of past or redundant institutional repertoires; transfer of experience across action spaces; or from other agents, through networks of structured relationships; the emergence of perceived “one best” solutions. This approach points to the need to change how typologies are used in neo-institutionalist research, so that those features of cases which do not fit the pre-conceived framework of a type are not disregarded as “noise”, but properly evaluated as potential resources for change.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance

2196. How Reliable is Pooled Analysis in Political Economy? The Globalization-Welfare State Nexus Revisited

Author:
Bernhard Kittel and Hannes Winner
Publication Date:
05-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
Panel data analysis has become very popular in comparative political economy. However, in order to draw meaningful inferences from such data, one has to address specification and estimation issues carefully. This paper aims to demonstrate various pitfalls that typically occur in applied empirical work. To illustrate this, we refer to the debate on the globalization-welfare state nexus. We reexamine a model by Garrett and Mitchell (2001), a leading study in this regard. Utilizing a data set of 17 OECD countries and the time period 1961 to 1993, they find evidence that globalization and partisan composition have a significant impact on the extent of public activity. However, because they apply a dynamic specification in levels, they do not adequately take into account both the dynamic and spherical nature of the data. In contrast, we propose an autoregressive model in first differences that is shown to perform well in statistical terms. Further, we explicitly pay attention to the time pattern of the globalization-welfare state nexus. Substantively, we find evidence that government spending is primarily driven by the state of the domestic economy. Neither partisan effects nor the international economic environment have affected public expenditure considerably.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, and Political Economy

2197. Political Parties, Institutions, and the Dynamics of Social Expenditure in Times of Austerity

Author:
Herbert Obinger and Bernhard Kittel
Publication Date:
01-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The containment of social expenditure growth has been (and still is) a core issue of public policy in advanced industrial countries since the 1980s and has received much academic attention during that period. Among the most extensively discussed explanatory factors of social expenditure are partisan politics and political institutions, as well as the dependency of the real impact of the former on the latter. The paper distinguishes five competing theoretical perspectives and explores their power to explain the empirical variation in the period 1982–1997 in 21 OECD countries. The empirical analysis of short-term dynamics is performed in a time-series cross-section framework while long-term level effects are explored in a cross-sectional setting. By using an interactive model specification the authors show that there is empirical evidence for this conditional effect, albeit it is neither thoroughly convincing nor leading to lasting long-term level effects. Extensive specification tests show that the 1990s witnessed a weakening of partisan effects which were still present in the 1980s. In total, the evidence tends to give most support to the “growth-to-limits” and the “new politics” perspectives.
Topic:
Economics, Government, International Trade and Finance, and Political Economy

2198. The Declining Use of Unskilled Labour in Italian Manufacturing: Is Trade to Blame?

Author:
Paul Brenton and Anna Maria Pinna
Publication Date:
12-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies
Abstract:
As in other industrialised countries, the manufacturing sector in Italy has recently experienced a substantial increase in the use of skilled relative to unskilled workers — skill upgrading. In this paper we estimate a model, based upon the notion of outsourcing, of the relative demand for skilled labour which allows identification of the roles of technological change and trade, the two main culprits, in skill upgrading. Compared to previous studies of Italy the model is applied to highly disaggregated industrial data and in addition the impact of trade is more precisely measured through the separate identification of import flows from low-wage labour abundant countries and those from OECD partners. Furthermore we also introduce a measure of trade variability. Our results show firstly that economic variables played little or no role in determining the relative demand for unskilled workers in the 1970s in Italy, reflecting the nature of Italian labour market institutions in the period. Subsequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, following some labour market reforms, we find that international competition, in terms of import penetration and the variability of trade prices, had a significant effect on the relative demand for blue-collar workers in Italy in skilled intensive sectors. In unskilled intensive sectors, such as textiles and clothing, where the impact of imports from low-wage countries might be expected to be more pronounced, we do not find a significant effect from imports but rather that the most important role has been played by technological change. The result is consistent with previous studies that indicate that Italian textile and clothing firms have remained internationally competitive by increasingly switching to high quality segments of the industry.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Trade and Finance, Migration, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe and Italy

2199. Shaping Europe's Migration Policy

Author:
Joanna Apap
Publication Date:
12-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies
Abstract:
During the 1990s, Justice and Home Affairs moved, in an unexpected way, to centre stage in the European debate. Concern had been growing about immigration policy since the Maastricht Treaty institutionalised the third pillar of the European Union. This concern had been stimulated by several factors – the persistence of irregular migration and tragic incidents, such as the one in Dover in July 2000 in which 58 Chinese nationals lost their lives trying to enter illegally into the United Kingdom, the need for immigrant workers in some sectors, and the spectre of an ageing European population. More generally, the Treaty of Amsterdam, since its entry into force in 1999, represents a major development in overall Justice and Home Affairs policy, and the implementation of the treaty provisions in Justice and Home Affairs was described as the next major EU initiative after the single currency.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Trade and Finance, Migration, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe

2200. What Are the Limits to Economic Integration?

Author:
Paul Brenton
Publication Date:
11-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies
Abstract:
This paper discusses the continuing importance of borders, even within the EU, for the volume of international trade and global capital flows. It suggests that a range of factors, including the nature of the commercial, social and legal fabric of a country and the structure of consumers' preferences, act to constrain cross-border exchanges relative to internal transactions. Hence, whilst the process of globalisation may continue, there are likely to be distinct limits to the extent of economic integration. This entails that the traditional roles of governments in OECD countries in providing social welfare and regulating the market economy within national boundaries will not be seriously undermined. However, the situation may differ in developing countries where existing social and legal institutions may be compromised by globalisation rather than acting to dampen its impact.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Trade and Finance, Migration, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe