Suchergebnisse

"We have no horror of FOREIGN CAPITAL - if subjected to (domestic) management (Niles' Weekly Register, cited in Wilkins, 1989: 85) We are always prepared to provide the necessary security to foreign capital on the condition that its profits be regulated by law [emphasis added] (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, quoted in Lipson 1985, 72). In June 2016, the Indian government announced sweeping changes to its foreign investment laws that eliminated government approval processes for most sectors and substantially increased the maximum foreign equity allowed for firms in several sectors, including retail, food, defense, airlines, broadcasting, and pharmaceuticals. In response, several Indian trade unions voiced their strong disapproval. Unions representing government employees announced an indefinite strike.1 Far-left and far-right affiliated trade unions issued strong condemnations of the proposed liberalizations, arguing such moves would not increase employment but would lead to increased labor law violations and push small firms out of business.2 In contrast to labor unions, business groups reacted positively to investment policy changes."

As a scholar of the politics of the nexus of national security and investment policy, I can best add to the discussion on the issue of data and digital tech restrictions mostly from a foreign investment regulation and investment screening vantage point.

What factors generate financial fragility in open economies? Existing research assumes that the development of these conditions is more likely to emerge under some configurations of domestic economic and political attributes. We examine the development of financial fragility through the ontological lens of the new interdependence approach, which assumes that global factors can be as important as local factors in generating outcomes. We analyze global financial conditions from 1978 to 2009 and argue that contemporary global finance is an oscillating system that generates boom and bust capital flow cycles. The phases of this cycle are a consequence of the scale of US net borrowing on global markets: when the United States is a large net importer of foreign capital, other economies struggle to attract foreign capital and are substantially less likely to develop fragile financial positions; when US net capital imports fall, other economies receive an abundance of foreign capital, and financial fragility becomes more likely. In contrast, we find little evidence that cross-national variation in political institutions or financial systems explains why fragility develops, although some regional interdependencies are evident. We conclude that global conditions drive the probability of crises occurring someplace in the system, while local outcomes appear to be idiosyncratic.

Although the subprime crisis regenerated interest in and stimulated debate about how to study the politics of global finance, it has not sparked the development of new approaches to International Political Economy (IPE), which remains firmly rooted in actor-centered models. We develop an alternative network-based approach that shifts the analytical focus to the relations between actors. We first depict the contemporary global financial system as a network, with a particular focus on its hierarchical structure. We then explore key characteristics of this global financial network, including how the hierarchic network structure shapes the dynamics of financial contagion and the source and persistence of power. Throughout, we strive to relate existing research to our network approach in order to highlight exactly where this approach accommodates, where it extends, and where it challenges existing knowledge generated by actor-centered models. We conclude by suggesting that a network approach enables us to construct a systemic IPE that is theoretically and empirically pluralist.