Suchergebnisse

Economic statecraft (ES) has been playing an increased role in affecting the international relations. While armed conflicts decline, states have been weaponising trade, investment, and other economic ties to gain leverage over their counterparts. In the contemporary world, ES is not only used to galvanise countries' influence in specific issue areas but also part of their grand strategy to achieve broad power-maximisation goals. Despite a proliferation of ES literatures in recent years, extant research tended to focus on great powers' ES, leaving small states' ES under-examined. Also, previous studies usually looked into how countries unilaterally employ ES. Hence, insufficient attention has been paid to how regional states work together to collectively alter multilateral frameworks to advance their ES. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates small nations' roles in the development of multilateral cooperative frameworks. Using the ES lens, it explores how these countries leverage these schemes to push forward their collective ES. The main argument is that regional states worked together to craft the terms of multilateral economic agreements to galvanise their clout over certain governance areas. I validate this argument by using the case of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This study makes contributions to the research pertaining to ES, small states' strategies, and economic regionalism. It also yields practical implications for policymakers involved in fostering international economic governance. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

This article seeks to shed light on a question: "What explains a nation's medical tourism?" This paper focuses on the roles played by a central government in shaping the industry, espescially how it balances the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing medical tourism, which has been under-examined. I attempt to fill such intellectual gap by investigating the roles in the Singaporean government in affecting the country's medical tourism. Via this case, I demonstrate how the state's authorities crafted the rules and regulations to promote the sector and simultaneously cope with the adverse effects that the industry brings to the nation. Insights from my analysis not only extends the existing literatures on the development of medical tourism and roles of domestic political institutions in shaping states' policy outcomes, but also provides practitioners with lessons useful for crafting effective policies to sustain their countries' pursuit of medical tourism. ; Published version

This paper studies the roles of co-chairs in international negotiations. This study attempts to fill the research gap by scrutinizing co-chairs' effectiveness, defined as an ability to shape agreement details in one's direction, to better understand chairs' and co-chairs' influence in negotiations. I argue that a co-chair's effectiveness is not a function of resource possession, but is rooted in its resource management, or ability to convert the existing resources into bargaining influence. To validate my argument, I analyze the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) negotiation rounds from 2005 to 2010, focusing on the members' financial contributions and vote shares. (Pac Rev/GIGA)