Suchergebnisse

AbstractNational governments have signed and ratified over three thousand International Investment Agreements (IIAs), which for the first time give multinational firms standing to sue host governments in international arbitration tribunals. IIAs have led to a host of high-profile and controversial legal disputes that have led to claims that investor state arbitration may be impeding governments in their ability to regulate and to protect their citizens' well-being, a phenomenon known as "regulatory chill." To understand the normative implications of regulatory chill, I analyze investor state arbitration over tobacco in Australia and Latin America. I examine legislative discussions over possible regulatory changes in Australia and Uruguay, the two cases that have faced disputes over tobacco laws, as well as in Latin American countries that provide access to the legislative debates and had legislative initiatives that sought to strengthen tobacco legislation. These cases demonstrate that tobacco packaging laws in a number of countries have been delayed or reduced as a result of fears of potential arbitration among the government and legislators. This regulatory chill is normatively problematic as it suggests that states may be giving up more of their regulatory authority than they initially believed they would have to under IIAs.

AbstractIMF loans during times of financial crisis often occur in conjunction with bilateral financial rescues. These bilateral bailouts are substantial in size and a central component of international cooperation during financial crises. We analyze the political economy of bilateral bailouts and study the trade-offs that potential creditor governments experience when other countries find themselves in financial distress. Creditor governments want to stabilize crisis countries by providing additional liquidity, particularly if the crisis country is economically or politically important to them, but they are constrained by domestic politics. Politicians aim to balance these countervailing pressures. They provide bailouts when their own economy is exposed to negative spillover effects and when the crisis country is important for geostrategic, military, or political reasons. Domestic economic and political constraints, on the other hand, limit their ability to bail out other countries. We test our hypotheses using an original data set on bilateral bailouts by the G7 countries to countries that experienced financial crises between 1975 and 2010. The findings of our statistical analysis support our theoretical argument and contribute to a deeper understanding of international cooperation's complex structure during financial crises.

AbstractConditions on aid agreements aim to increase aid effectiveness, and are, therefore, an important component of aid agreements. Yet little is known about why aid-recipient governments comply with these conditions. Some scholars have suggested a strategic-importance hypothesis: recipients comply when donors enforce conditions—and donors enforce conditions when recipients are not strategically important. However, there are many cases where strategically important countries comply with conditions and strategically unimportant countries fail to do so. We argue that to explain compliance, we must also understand how the desire to maximize revenue from major income sources, such as FDI and natural resource rents, changes the recipient's incentive to comply. Using data on World Bank records of compliance from 1964 to 2010, we find strong support for our hypotheses even after accounting for different model specifications and potential endogeneity. Paradoxically, donors can secure compliance from recipients for reasons unrelated to the promise of additional aid.

This paper analyzes multilateral aid allocation in the European Union (EU). We argue that EU members can influence the aid allocation process toward their national interests if they form powerful coalitions that bias the European Commission's development policies. When EU members' preferences over aid allocation are heterogeneous, the Commission can implement multilateral aid according to its programmatic goals. Greater homogeneity of EU members' goals, however, increases the likelihood that members can form powerful interest coalitions and induce the Commission to allocate aid according to their own national interests. The empirical analysis provides robust support for our theoretical argument, and the findings generally indicate that interest coalitions play an important role in multilateral aid allocation. Adapted from the source document.

Political risk frequently impedes the flow of capital into developing countries. In response, governments often adopt innovative institutions that aim to attract greater flows of international investment and trade by changing the institutional environment and limiting the risk to outside investors. One primary example of this is the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), aimed specifically at increasing the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries. Yet the literature in political science and economics is inconclusive about whether or not BITs do indeed stimulate FDI, and it provides conflicting theoretical reasoning for the claimed connection. This article argues that BITs do attract FDI to developing countries, but the story is a complicated one. Two important factors must be taken into account. First, BITs cannot entirely substitute for an otherwise weak investment environment. Countries must have the necessary domestic institutions in place that interact with BITs to make these international commitments credible and valuable to investors. Second, as the coverage of BITs increases, overall FDI flows to developing countries increase. However, although remaining positive, the marginal effect of a country's BITs on its own FDI may fall because of heightened competition for FDI from other BIT countries. Using data from 97 countries for 1984-2007, we provide empirical evidence consistent with both of these theoretical claims. Adapted from the source document.

The landscape of the global economy is dotted with institutions that regulate investment and trade. in recent years, the number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and preferential trade agreements (PTAs), in particular, has grown at a torrid pace; practically every country is a member of at least one-if not many-of these institutions. For all the scholarly attention that these institutions have received, however, there is little research tying BITs and PTAs together. this is surprising, since both aim to increase commerce by making it more predictable. The authors seek to fill this gap in the literature. They argue that a BIT between a developed and a developing country should make it more likely that this pair of states will subsequently form a PTA. that said, the wrinkle in the story is that more is not better in this regard; the authors further argue that a developing country that has many BITs is less likely to conclude a PTA with a wealthy state. The authors test these hypotheses using annual data on pairs of developing and developed countries between 1960 and 2004 and find strong evidence in support of their argument. Adapted from the source document.