Suchergebnisse

Foreign investment policy is an increasingly important part of overall foreign policy. The authors investigate the substance of U.S. outgoing foreign direct investment (OFDI) and incoming foreign direct investment (IFDI) policy in terms of a small set of policy values and process factors. The policy values are domestic prosperity, national autonomy, and national security. The process factors are ideological consonance, impact transparency, the diffusion and concentration of perceived costs and benefits, and the political capacity of groups and institutions. These considerations illuminate the relative stability in both areas of policy since World War II, and help to explain the changes that did take place. The paper concludes with a forecast that, despite the oft-heard prediction that economic nationalism is on the increase, U.S. policies toward foreign investment will remain much the same during the eighties as they have been Since World War II.

TRADE POLICY IS A CRITICAL PART OF ANY NATION'S FOREIGN POLICY, AND U.S. POLICY DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD HAS SHOWN BOTH CONTINUITY AND CHANGE. FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT POLICY GAINS IMPORTANCE BECAUSE A LARGE SHARE OF WORLD TRADE NOW TAKES PLACE WITHIN FIRMS OPERATING IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT ALSO CAN HAVE FOREIGN POLICY SIGNIFICANCE INDEPENDENT OF ITS ROLE IN WORLD TRADE.

Reasons for the lack of cooperation in energy research and development among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; based on conference paper.

Continued dependence on expensive imported liquid fuels puts stress on the relations among and the domestic performance of the members of OECD. Coordinated energy R&D could in principle lessen those stresses and also benefit other liquid fuel consumers. A political economy approach can help explain the tepid pursuit of this possibility in two ways. First, it can clarify the reasons for the weak collective action energy R&D record of the members of the OECD both before and after the oil events of 1973. Second, it can demonstrate and identify the nature of the undersupply of the public good of energy knowledge. The history of this area illustrates several general obstacles to the provision of public goods in realistically complex political situations. These include the uncertain and distant nature of commitments to actually deliver collective goods in the absense of self-enforcing agreements, unwillingness to jeopardize possible future private advantages, and the tendencies to link provision of particular public goods to cooperation by other parties with the provider on a host of other matters. In effect, the attempts of particular statesmen to tie energy R&D cooperation to other issues reinforce tendencies to view the choices not as ones about the level of provision of public goods, but rather as ones about national shares of private goods—economic, military, and political.

Our choice of theoretical perspectives to apply to resource cartels seriously affects the questions we ask, the predictions we make, and the policy suggestions we draw. In this paper we examine the implications (and the limitations) of five perspectives for the analysis of resource cartels in general and the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) in particular: the theory of cartels; the theory of depletable resources; coalition theory; internal politics approaches; and the theory of collective action. Three classes of actors are considered-exporting producers, importing consumers, and multinational resource exploitation firms. We gain in realism by proceeding from simple to more complicated situations by including political concerns, bureaucratic divisions, and the prospect of military coercion. Yet, we do so at the price of rigorous deductive frameworks with clear and coherent predictions.