Die vorliegende Studie untersucht erstmalig für die Ukraine und Polen, welchen Einfluss die politische Orientierung und die in den Regionen vertretenen Machtparteien auf die Zuflüsse von ausländischen Direktinvestitionen haben. Die empirische Untersuchung erfolgt auf regionaler Ebene im Zeitraum 2004-2012 anhand des Fixed-Effects-Schätzers. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass ein 'political and partisan cycle' für die Zuflüsse der ausländischen Direktinvestitionen in der Ukraine und Polen existiert. Die politische Orientierung einer Region hat einen positiven Einfluss auf die Standortwahl der ausländischen Direktinvestitionen in beiden Ländern. In der Ukraine haben die Regionen, in denen die Tymoshenko-Partei an der Regierungsspitze ist, 22-33% höhere Zuflüsse des ausländischen Kapitals als Regionen mit der Janukovych-Partei an der Macht. In Polen gibt es hingegen keine robusten Parteieneffekte auf die ausländischen Direktinvestitionen.
The dissertation contributes to the literature on the political economy of foreign aid and foreign direct investments to developing countries. Chapter I focus on the changing ideology of the German government over the 1973 – 2010 period and analyses whether this affects the importance of the factors that determine German bilateral aid allocation. In Chapter II the focus changes from aid allocation in general to the specific design of conditionality that is attached to the World Bank's development policy lending. The analysis focuses on a specific subset of conditions, i.e., trade conditions, and how they relate to the commercial interests of the Bank's five major shareholders. The analysis in Chapter III investigates the relationship between the ratification of international human rights conventions and foreign aid to explain why countries ratify these conventions. Finally, Chapter IV studies foreign direct investment flows to resource-rich developing countries after these countries join a transparency initiative for resource-rich countries to test whether this initiative has a positive signalling effect on foreign investors.
We conduct experiments to investigate the effects of different majority requirements on bargaining outcomes in small and large groups. In particular, we use a Baron-Ferejohn protocol and investigate the effects of decision rules on delay (number of bargaining rounds needed to reach agreement) and measures of "fairness" (inclusiveness of coalitions, equality of the distribution within a coalition). We find that larger groups and unanimity rule are associated with significantly larger decision making costs in the sense that first round proposals more often fail, leading to more costly delay. The higher rate of failure under unanimity rule and in large groups is a combination of three facts: (1) in these conditions, a larger number of individuals must agree, (2) an important fraction of individuals reject offers below the equal share, and (3) proposers demand more (relative to the equal share) in large groups.
We investigate whether lending by the Islamic Development Bank mirrors Saudi Arabia's political interests based on religious affinity using panel data for its 56 member countries over the 1970 to 2007 period. Our results indicate that Sunni regime countries receive favorable treatment in terms of loan allocation, as well as Shia majority populated countries in exceptional occasions of conflict with other religious minority groups, while non-Muslim countries are the least favored. There is also evidence that lending by the World Bank to the same group of countries and over the same time frame does not respond to the political stance of Saudi Arabia founded on religion. These findings reveal the advantage that Saudi Arabia gains by assuming the leadership of a Regional Development Bank in contrast to coordinating common strategies in a global International Financial Institution with other large shareholders for whom religion might not be essential for political alliances.
Do states use trade to reward and punish partners? WTO rules and the pressures of globalization restrict states' capacity to manipulate trade policies, but we argue that governments can link political goals with economic outcomes using less direct avenues of influence over firm behavior. Where governments intervene in markets, politicization of trade is likely to occur. In this paper, we examine one important form of government control: state ownership of firms. Taking China and India as examples, we use bilateral trade data by firm ownership type, as well as measures of bilateral political relations based on diplomatic events and UN voting to estimate the effect of political relations on import and export flows. Our results support the hypothesis that imports controlled by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) exhibit stronger responsiveness to political relations than imports controlled by private enterprises. A more nuanced picture emerges for exports; while India's exports through SOEs are more responsive to political tensions than its flows through private entities, the opposite is true for China. This research holds broader implications for how we should think about the relationship between political and economic relations going forward, especially as a number of countries with partially state-controlled economies gain strength in the global economy.
We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, we test whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country has served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the aid has been committed, which provides quasi-random variation in aid. Our results show that the relationship of aid with growth is significantly lower when aid has been committed during a country's tenure on the UNSC. We derive two conclusions from this. First, short-term political favoritism reduces growth. Second, political interest variables are inadequate as instruments for overall aid, raising doubts about a large number of results in the aid effectiveness literature.
The so called resource curse, the fact that countries rich in natural resources often show lower rates of economic growth compared to resource-poor countries, is commonly attributed to the low quality of governance in resource-rich countries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was founded in 2003 to address this problem through increasing the quality of the public financial management of resource flows. By joining this initiative, governments show their willingness to reform and to improve their governance. As the quality of governance is an important factor for investors in deciding where to invest, this signal has the potential to improve a country's appeal for foreign direct investment (FDI). This study shows in a panel of 81 countries that joining the EITI increases the ratio of FDI inflows to GDP on average by around two percentage points. This is a remarkable increase given that the average ratio of FDI inflows to GDP in the sample is five percent. The results are robust when controlling for selection bias due to the voluntary decision to join the initiative and possible endogeneity of the candidate variable.
Discontent with the substantial influence of major global players in International Financial Institutions (IFIs) has raised a call to restructure these organizations. Greater involvement of borrowing members in lending decisions has been proposed in order to limit the exposure of development resources to the interests of large donors. No consensus has been reached, however, if such eventual reforms would create more independent and efficient IFIs. Through its analysis of the allocation patterns of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), this paper contributes to the debate on whether greater representation of borrowers in the governance of IFIs truly translates into fairer lending practices. Far from being a fully democratic institution, the IDB is nevertheless an example of a major IFI not dominated by non-borrowers, and its organization and lending behavior may well provide some clues to resolve the broader debate. Empirical results from examining IDB loan commitments granted during the 1970-2007 period reveal that control over IDB allocation decisions by its largest stakeholder, the US, is limited. This atypical finding is a result of the strong influence of borrowing members in the governance of the Bank. In particular, interest heterogeneity among the US and large borrowers leads to distributional conflicts, thereby creating the opportunity for greater institutional autonomy.
I investigate the effect of ratification of different human rights treaties adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Official Development Assistance (ODA) by donors of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). On average the ratification of an additional human rights treaty increases total ODA by 6% (around 33.5 million USD) and the ratification of one of the two most important treaties, on torture and civil and political rights, increases total ODA by up to 19% (around 97million USD). Additionally I show that countries with low human rights compliance can use treaty ratification as a substitute for actual improvements in their protection of human rights. While ratification of the two most important treaties does not increase ODA for countries with low levels of respect for human rights, it increases aid commitments for those countries with the lowest respect for human rights by almost 42%. This pattern does not significantly differ between the Nordic donors and the five most important DAC donors. The results become stronger when taking possible endogeneity of treaty ratification into account.
Credit rating agencies are frequently criticized for producing sovereign ratings that do not accurately reflect the economic and political fundamentals of rated countries. This article discusses how the home country of rating agencies could affect rating decisions as a result of political economy influences and culture. Using data from nine agencies based in six countries, we investigate empirically if there is systematic evidence for a home bias in sovereign ratings. Specifically, we use dyadic panel data to test whether, all else being equal, agencies assign better ratings to their home countries, as well as to countries economically, politically and culturally aligned with them. While most of the variation in ratings is explained by the fundamentals of rated countries, our results provide empirical support for the existence of a home bias in sovereign ratings. We find that the bias becomes more accentuated following the onset of the Global Financial Crisis and appears to be driven by economic and cultural ties, not geopolitics.
Aid fragmentation and a lack of donor coordination have been widely recognized as principal problems impairing the effectiveness of aid. In particular, the importance of within-country division of labor has been highlighted in recent years. At the same time, rigorous quantitative analyses of within-country aid coordination are largely missing. Taking the whole donor pool(including NGOs) within an aid recipient country into account, we examine the coordination behavior of donors across regions and sectors. Our results indicate a modest degree of donor coordination within Cambodia, even after the 2005 Paris Declaration. In particular, the coordination efforts among bilateral donors seem rather limited, suggesting that their political and economic interests prevent closer coordination. With respect to the behavior of NGOs, we find them to be mainly active in the same regions and sectors as official donors, creating coordination problems between the two groups of donors. In addition, NGOs appear to cluster in the regional-sectoral space although there seems to be some sort of coordination among them.
This paper studies monitoring and punishment behavior by second and third parties in a cooperation experiment with endogenous information structures: Players are uninformed whether the target player cooperated or defected at the cooperation stage, but can decide to resolve the information imperfection at non-negative cost at the punishment stage. We examine how monitoring and punishment respond to changes in monitoring costs, and exploit the evidence to gain new insights about commonalities and differences between second and third party behavior. We establish three effects of positive monitoring costs relative to the zero-cost baseline and find that each one affects third parties differently than second parties: A «direct punishment cost effect» (the supply of non-strategic punishment decreases), a «blind punishment effect» (players punish without resolving the information imperfection) and a «diffusion effect» (defectors make up a smaller share of the punished and receive weaker punishment). The first effect affects third parties less, the other two more. As a result, third party punishment leads to increasingly weaker incentives for cooperation relative to second party punishment as monitoring costs rise. In addition, the differences between second and third parties suggest the presence of a «pure role effect»: Taking into account elicited beliefs and risk preferences, third parties punish differently from second parties, not just more weakly.
Die Diskussion um Karl Marx ist lange Zeit nur ideologisch positionell geführt worden. Wer sich nicht als Gegner oder Befürworter der Marxschen Lehre erklärte, hatte es schwer, in dieser Diskussion Gehör zu finden. Im letzten Viertel des vorigen Jahrhunderts hat jedoch sowohl in philosophischer als auch wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Hinsicht eine neue Art der Auseinandersetzung mit den Werken von Karl Marx begonnen. Dabei haben die Kontrahenten sowohl auf marxistischer als auch auf nichtmarxistischer Seite viel ideologischen Ballast beiseite geräumt, und in manchen Positionen hat man sich auch in inhaltlicher Hinsicht angenähert. Trotzdem ist die Diskussion in einem wichtigen Aspekt fragmentarisch geblieben. Auch wenn marxistische und nichtmarxistische Ökonomen nun eine gemeinsame Sprache gefunden haben, so gilt das weit weniger für Philosophen und Ökonomen. Charakteristischerweise zeigt sich das an der Rolle Hegels. Während viele Philosophen dazu neigen, Marx von Hegel her zu verstehen, tendieren Ökonomen und auch der Ökonomik nahestehende Philosophen dazu, Hegel zu vernachlässigen oder ihm allenfalls eine verwirrende oder störende Rolle im Marxschen Denken zuzugestehen. In unserem Essay wollen wir daher herausarbeiten, dass der Bezug zu Hegel und zu der Tradition der Philosophie überhaupt ein konstitutiver Bestandteil der Marxschen Theorie und gerade auch ihres ökonomischen Teils ist. Dabei versuchen wir nichts weniger als eine Gesamteinschätzung der Marxschen Lehre und ihrer oft verwirrenden Vielschichtigkeit zu geben. Im Einzelnen werden wir auf Marx' Hegelbezug und den historischen Materialismus mit seinen Grundbegriffen, den Produktivkräften und Produktionsverhältnissen eingehen. Von daher werden wir eine Einschätzung von Marx' Analyse der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise geben und dabei versuchen, ihre qualitativen und quantitativen Aspekte gesondert herauszuarbeiten. Zentrale Aussagen der Marxschen Ökonomik wie die Arbeitswertlehre und das Gesetz vom tendenziellen Fall der Profitrate werden wir im Licht der modernen Wirtschaftswissenschaften diskutieren. Dabei werden auch wichtige Einsichten von Marx hinsichtlich der Umwelt- und Rohstoffprobleme, vor denen wir heute stehen, zur Sprache kommen. Nicht zuletzt gehen wir auf die Konsequenzen ein, die sich aus Marx' Ansatz für das Problem der Gerechtigkeit und der Einkommensverteilung ergeben. Und schließlich wollen wir erklären, woher bei Marx das notorische Defizit einer politischen Theorie rührt.
Am Dienstag, den 17. Januar 2012, fand in der Alten Aula der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität die neunte Alfred-Weber-Lecture statt. Der Referent, Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Kurt Biedenkopf, ist ehemaliger Ministerpräsident von Sachsen und einer der glänzendsten Analytiker der deutschen Politik. Kurt Biedenkopf verkörpert auf außergewöhnliche Weise das Bild des politischen Intellektuellen, der die deutsche Politik verändert hat. Als Gastgeber möchte das Alfred-Weber-Institut den Studierenden, den MitarbeiterInnen des Instituts und der Universität sowie einem interessierten Publikum aus der Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar das Zusammenspiel von Wirtschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft durch Vorträge namhafter Referenten näher bringen. Die Einleitung der Lecture erfolgte durch Prof. Dr. Axel Dreher, nach dem Vortrag fand eine abschließende Publikumsdisskusion statt.
Income inequality in China is severe; measured by the Gini-coefficient it amounted to 0.46 in 2011; wealth distribution is even worse with 0.61. These disparities led to a major shift in emphasis of politics in general and of the Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development by the National People´s Congress in particular. While previously the strategy of the Five-Year Plans had been "Making the nation [our emphasis] rich as top priority", this was changed to "Making people [our emphasis] rich as top priority" in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), enacted in March 2011.The strategic change from "nation" to "people" indicates that the political decision-makers in China accepted the aim of a fair income distribution as a political issue of great importance. In this paper, richness is defined in the political-philosophical tradition as the right measure for one's own needs and wants; only its environmental aspect is focused on in this study. The development of the Chinese environmental conditions is compared with the German ones and the former's future outlook is judged optimistically because of the achievements in the last five years. However, the complexity and fragility of the environmental system will within a decade confront Chinese politicians with the same problems as it does right now in Germany. In order to provide a solution addressing this development, this paper analyzes what Karl Marx had to say on the long-run dynamics of the economic system. He saw poverty as a necessary yet unintended consequence of the capitalistic system and used this insight as a "precision tool for the study of social change" (Elster 1986), which can also be employed to examine the unintended repercussions of economic activity on nature. Marx, who studied environmental and resource issues in detail, thought that the inventiveness of the capitalistic system would finally overcome all of them in the course of time. In view of the fact that three billion people on earth still have a backlog demand to satisfy basic needs and in addition a further three billion are expected to be born until 2050, the future of the natural environmental conditions looks somber. If it is not possible to decouple economic growth from ensuing environmental strain, Marx may well be right after all in his prediction that the capitalistic system will collapse, although in quite a different manner than he thought. This being the case we take recourse to the thoughts of one of the influential intellectual German figures, to Romano Guardini. He foresaw changes in the self-perception of humankind and in the comprehension of nature. These imply a shift in the ethos of government as well, which would in turn pose three great challenges to politics: (i) understanding nature in a new light, (ii) listening to what drives human hearts, and (iii) governing according to law.
