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This paper proposes that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), experienced a deepening/widening tradeoff: as their membership increased (greater width), their effectiveness in promoting trade between members/participants declined (lesser de facto depth). This proposition is tested using gravity models of bilateral trade, first separating the GATT and WTO, which are usually combined into a single variable, and then adding a width variable corresponding to each institution. The results show that (1) both regimes were the deepest, or the most trade effective, when they had the fewest member-states and (2) their trade effectiveness declined, eventually becoming statistically insignificant, as more countries joined. As a quantitative case study, this paper provides some of the first evidence consistent with a tradeoff between depth and width within international institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in American foreign policy and argues for its reinstatement. It highlights the economic gains, job creation, and policy leverage that joining the TPP could bring, particularly in countering China's rise. However, the article acknowledges the challenges of persuading the American public and Congress due to partisan gridlock and populist backlash. It also mentions the Biden administration's introduction of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) as an alternative, but suggests that active advocacy is needed to rally support for the TPP and pursue a coherent foreign economic policy. [Extracted from the article]

This paper considers a messaging strategy to shift immigration preferences, arguing that if citizen attitudes in this issue-area build from several dimensions, then a positive message related to each dimension should move attitudes in a more favorable direction. It tests the first part using original survey data with directly comparable questions about whether immigration hurts/helps American culture/the economy/national security, providing evidence that all three dimensions currently support the preferences of voting-age citizens. It tests the second part by randomly presenting another sample with different messages about how labor immigration strengthens national security, creates new jobs, or enhances culture, finding that all three reduce anti-immigration attitudes with significant effects even within groups that are more opposed to immigration (namely, white Americans, those with less education, and partisan Republicans). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economy research shows that more democratic governments generally have more open trade policies with more flexible exchange rate regimes, yet political behavior theory argues that citizens do not think of foreign economic policy as salient and do not cast their votes considering such issues. This note investigates the puzzle about how democracies could have different foreign economic policies than autocracies if citizens do not vote based on these international issues. Using a political model with two possible ways for societal actors to influence state policy (electoral and/or special interest pressure), it first considers how voting based on salient domestic outcomes like inflation and unemployment may lead democratic governments towards more open trade and flexible exchange rates. Second, if more societal groups are able to lobby as special interests in more democratic regimes, then governments may also be pushed toward these same foreign economic policies. Thus, there is no fundamental contradiction between the political economy empirical results and the political behavior theory, although scholars need to adjust their theories to explain foreign economic policy differences across political regime type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to restore labor competition as an explanation for anti-immigration attitudes, recognizing that education may proxy both individual-level skill and cultural socialization. We thus need new tests to distinguish the effect of education based on skill from that due to socialization. If the education effect is consistent with these relationships, then we can have greater confidence that it is capturing the former and not simply the latter. This paper thus develops and conducts a new test, using data from the International Social Survey Program's National Identity Survey fielded in 2013 across thirty-two countries. From a factoral framework, our test identifies three national-level factors that should influence how much labor market pressure lower skilled citizens feel from immigration: the quantity of immigrants, the direction of capital/investment flows, and the amount of trade protection. These national-level factors are interacted with individual-level education, showing that the attitudinal differences based on education increase with more immigrants but decrease with greater investment inflows and increased trade protection. These results demonstrate why this economic dimension may sometimes be hidden: in national contexts where there are few immigrants, capital follows labor, and/or there is trade protection, labor competition as a driver of anti-immigration preferences should lessen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the proposition that remittances act as a political curse by reducing the poor's demand for economic redistribution. With a newer democratization model focused on the demand for income protection from the rising groups in society, remittances may instead function as a political blessing. Since remittances increase income not only for the middle-class citizens that receive most of them, but also for the merchant and working classes that do not receive them per the multiplier effect, remittances should increase the demand for political rights to protect the economic assets of these societal groups. Using an error correction model with both country and year fixed effects, it reports a significant positive relationship between the change in democracy and net remittance inflows as a share of GDP using three different operational measures for democracy. It also reports results consistent with the underlying causal argument, showing how remittances increase national income and societal economic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the argument that as labor immigration policy opens, it must also become more restrictive in terms of immigrant rights. After discussing this tradeoff logic, positing a negative relationship between external (numbers) and internal (rights) labor migration policy, it then extends the underlying political model to show that when accounting for the lobbying pressure of firms seeking high skill labor, a very different expectation emerges. This political accommodation argument predicts a positive relationship between external and internal migration policy, or that policy related to labor immigration openness and immigrant rights should advance together, although not necessarily quickly or at the same rate. It then tests these competing propositions using a new dataset that sorts labor migration policy changes among 38 advanced industrial democracies from 1995 to 2016 into these two dimensions, finding a significant positive relationship between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article enters the international/comparative political economy debate about whether individual-level macroeconomic policy preferences are egocentric and, if so, on what basis (factors, sectors, or firms). It argues that contextual information may function as a precondition for the emergence of egocentric preferences. With a focus on the trade-off between using monetary policy for a domestic or an international goal, it presents evidence from three original American surveys using informative vignettes to show how monetary policy preferences exhibit firm-based egocentric variation: Individuals whose employer does most of its business in overseas markets have a lesser preference for domestic monetary autonomy. It also presents evidence from a survey experiment to show how the strength of this egocentric relationship depends on the informative power of the vignette: A more contextually informative vignette produces a stronger relationship between overseas business activity and a preference against domestic monetary autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the trade effect of flexibility design features within preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). Using a gravity model of bilateral trade that incorporates multilateral trade resistance, we report three main results. First, unconstrained escape provisions undermine the effectiveness of PTAs when it comes to increasing trade. Second, adding some restrictions to these escape provisions more than offsets the negative effect of unconstrained escape, leading to more effective PTAs than those without escape options. Third, adding more restrictions beyond a certain point serves only to make PTAs less effective. Thus, both too much institutional flexibility and too much institutional rigidity reduces the ability of PTAs to promote trade. However, fitting these results to the descriptive data makes it appear that most PTAs would be even more trade effective if they included greater restrictions on the use of their escape provisions. Consequently, it appears that policymakers generally choose fewer escape restrictions than would be optimal in terms of trade performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper considers the causality underlying the so-called political aid curse, which proposes that foreign aid, like oil, should hinder democracy. Using a theoretical model which identifies repression and appeasement as the primary alternatives to democratization, it argues that aid revenue should not produce a political curse because it is less fungible, more conditional, and less constant than state oil revenue, making it difficult for recipient governments to use their aid to fund either repression or appeasement. Using several different measures associated with repression and appeasement, the statistical results show that aid cannot be associated with any of these dependent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do certain governments often have an actual exchange-rate policy that differs from their official declaration, creating a gap between their de jure and de facto exchange-rate regimes? This article offers a political explanation centered on the need for certain types of government to respond to a broader set of societal actors with different preferences concerning the exchange-rate regime. The argument posits that more democratic governments must respond to a broader set of societal actors, thus leading them to use their de jure and de facto regimes as short-term political substitutes. In using one regime (either de jure or de facto) to appeal to one group of societal actors and the other regime to appeal to another group with different preferences, exchange-rate regimes are hypothesized to be more frequent for more democratic governments. The statistic evidence accords with this expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine U.S. public attitudes regarding global climate change, addressing the puzzle of why support for governmental action on this front is tepid relative to what existing theories predict. Introducing the theoretical concept of relative sociotropic time horizons, the authors show that believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans. They then provide robustness checks by analyzing other policy attitudes. In so doing, the authors provide empirical evidence to suggest that citizens possessing shorter “shadows of the future” often resist policies trading short-term costs for hypothetical long-term benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After a decade of Aid for Trade (AfT) allocations, we can now begin to assess whether this new development strategy has been effective. Focusing on the short-term goal of export growth, we examine whether AfT from the US government promoted exports within recipient national economies over the period 1999-2008. Our results suggest that a $1 dollar increase in total US AfT has been associated with about a $69 increase in recipient exports 2 years later. We also show that the export effect of US AfT has not been confined to the US market and is driven primarily by exports to the rest of the world. In addition, we show that US AfT has been effective in reaching more needy countries as the substantive effect of US aid for trade has been larger in lesser-developed, landlocked, and more distant recipient countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do many resource-rich countries maintain autocratic political regimes? The authors’ proposed answer focuses on the causal effect of labor imports, or immigration. Using the logic offered by Acemoglu and Robinson’s democratization model, the authors posit that immigration makes democratization less likely because it facilitates redistributive concessions to appease the population within an autocratic regime. This immigration argument applies directly to the political resource curse since many resource-rich countries tend to also be labor scarce, leading them to import foreign laborers. Consistent with this understanding, the authors find a statistically significant negative relationship between net immigration per capita and democratization in future periods. Their results also show that when controlling for this immigration effect, the standard resource curse variables lose significance in a democratization model. This latter result suggests that much of the so-called resource curse stems not from resource endowments per se but rather from the labor imports related to resource production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that foreign aid can promote economic growth in recipient countries by facilitating economic reform, but only when the strategic benefits associated with providing aid are small for donor governments. When the strategic benefits are large, foreign aid becomes ineffective because Western governments cannot credibly enforce their conditions for economic reform. This paper presents evidence consistent with both the cause and effect of this argument. Based on the understanding that Western aid was driven more (less) by strategic factors during the Cold War era (post-Cold War era), it shows that aid has been positively associated with economic reform, but only after 1990 when Western governments could more credibly threaten to curtail their aid if such reform was not forthcoming. It also shows that aid has promoted economic growth, but only after 1990 when the strategic benefits associated with aid provision declined for most Western donors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to answer an important question in international cooperation theory: if cooperation requires successful bargaining among states, then what factors bring these states to the negotiation table in the first place? It presents a game-theoretic model of the ''prebargaining'' phase of the international cooperation problem, positing that states are more likely to enter a bargaining phase when the shadow of the future is long. This hypothesis is then tested in statistical models that explore how different shadow of the future indicators affect the probability of negotiations over territorial, river, and maritime claims in the Western Hemisphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether fixed exchange rate commitments and central bank independence have functioned more as institutional complements or as substitutes in achieving exchange rate stability. Focusing on the advanced industrial democracies in the post-Bretton Woods era, it argues that these two monetary institutions should have functioned in a non-complementary, but substitutable, manner with regards to this external policy goal. This argument is tested statistically using different measures of exchange rate variability and de facto exchange rate fixity. Finally, given evidence that fixed exchange rate commitments and central bank independence have not functioned as complementary institutions, this paper discusses why certain OECD (governments that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) governments nonetheless made fixed exchange rate commitments when their central bank was legally independent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commercial institutional peace research program has provided empirical evidence that such regional institutions help reduce the incidence of militarized interstate conflict. But it remains unclear how regional commercial institutions produce their observed pacific effect. This article examines three different causal arguments to explain the commercial institutional peace. First, commercial institutions simply increase the economic opportunity costs of war for the state. Second, some commercial institutions provide information to member-states about the military capabilities of other institutional participants, which may make their bargaining for peace more efficient. Third, many commercial institutions bring high-level state leaders together on a regular basis, building trust to overcome certain commitment problems in international bargaining. The statistical results show empirical support for only the third explanation. Commercial institutions with more organs for high-level state leaders demonstrate a substantively strong and statistically significant effect in reducing the outbreak of military conflict. But commercial institutions with deeper economic integration and nested military-security structures are not associated with less military conflict. Together, these results suggest that the observed commercial institutional peace does not stem from economic integration per se, but rather from certain institutional structures that often accompany the regional integration process. Thus, the commercial institutional peace appears more related to the third leg of the Kantian tripod (international organizations) than to the second leg (international commerce). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the commercial institutional peace research program provides empirical evidence that international institutions, especially preferential trade arrangements, help reduce the incidence of militarized inter-state conflict, it fails to delineate clearly how such institutions matter. Building from the logic that low opportunity costs for fighting, private information, and commitment problems constitute important causes of war, this article explores three interrelated causal mechanisms. First, the state leaders' increased expectations about future commerce create an incentive for these actors to consider peaceful bargains as an alternative to costly war. Second, security coordination under the umbrella of a commercial institution provides fuller information about state military capabilities, thus making inter-state bargaining for dispute resolution more efficient. Third, in bringing together high-level state leaders on a regular basis, commercial institutions may create the trust necessary to overcome commitment problems in inter-state bargaining. I explore how these mechanisms have operated within the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Economic Community of West African States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the dramatic expansion of British trade in the decades prior to World War I affected Britain's ability to raise an army. We first develop a simple institutionally based model of British army recruiting which we then perturb by expanding trade while holding all other variables constant. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the expansion of trade would impede Britain's ability to raise an army, a prediction that finds substantial support in the historical record using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that trade enhances a state's military power, we find that the expansion of trade did not ease Britain's resource constraints by making labor more freely available for military purposes. Rather, by raising the civilian demand for labor, the expansion of trade made labor more expensive and difficult to mobilize, even as a more effective army became more important to British strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the logic of a two-phase cooperation framework (first bargaining to reach an agreement, then enforcement of the negotiated agreement), this article examines how the risk of institutional breakdown can help promote international cooperation. I argue first that the risk of institutional breakdown can help promote bargaining cooperation by raising the opportunity costs of bargaining failure, thus providing a strong incentive for states who value the fragile international institution to negotiate a cooperative agreement. Having helped states to reach a cooperative bargain, the risk of institutional breakdown can also play a role in the subsequent enforcement phase. I argue second that the risk of valued institutional breakdown can reduce state preferences for defection, moving the enforcement problem away from the standard Prisoners' Dilemma structure. To illustrate these arguments, I examine the European Community's decision to recognize the breakaway Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An agent-based model in which economic exchange and military conflict are emergent processes is used to explore the relationship between trade and war. The model of exchange is an applied analysis of the economics of trading networks. The model of conflict treats war as a breakdown in interstate bargaining due to incomplete information. The simulations explore how initial economic geography, state revisionism, defensive advantage, and technological advancement akin to globalization affect both trade and war. The results show that the relationship between trade and war depends on third factors, and an inverse relationship between trade and war emerges from compact geographies with revisionist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under capital mobility, governments face a political choice: hold an autonomous monetary policy with currency instability or stabilize exchange rates with the sacrifice of policy autonomy. This article examines what domestic political factors led the advanced industrial democracies to choose an autonomous monetary policy and what factors led them instead to choose stable exchange rates in the post–Bretton Woods era. Leftist–led governments have opted for an autonomous loose fiscal–tight monetary policy mix associated with exchange rate instability. Rightist–led governments have chosen a tight fiscal–loose monetary policy mix associated with exchange rate stability. These results are important because they help reestablish partisan agency in terms of monetary–exchange rate policy making, even under the structural constraint of international capital mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]