International Political Economy II
Instructor
Hiwatari, Nobuhiro
Schedule
Winter Semester; Fri.; Time slot #3
Description
An advanced graduate-level course in international political economy. Apart from reviewing the basic theories and ideas of the field, the course will explain in detail recent theoretical developments and empirical findings.
The basic framework of international political economic studies can be expressed as the following:
International economic policy/ economic relations = political independent variables + economic control variables
The purpose of the course is to explain theories that hypothesize the relations among the economic control variables (based on basic economics) and the political dependent variables (especially, the degree of democratization and legalization) and introduce empirical results that test such hypotheses. Special emphasis will be placed on the recently claimed advantages of democratic institutions, which not only distributes domestically the gains of open trade and investment by compensating those hurt by open economic policies but also enables governments to make credible commitments to expand trade, investment, and financial relations. As such, trade agreements and investment treaties, fixed exchange rates and central bank independence, membership in international economic organizations (such as the GATT/WTO or IMF) or multilateral regimes can be regarded as devices used by either countries with weak democratic and legal institutions to reinforce their commitment to open economic development policy or trade dependent countries to settle international economic disputes through legalized procedures.
The course will is structured as below:
I. Theoretical Background
1. Theories of International Economic Conflict: Structural realism and
hegemonic stability theory
2. Theories of International Economic Cooperation: Interdependence, institutionalism,
and distribution problems
3. The Limits of System-level Analysis: Embedded liberalism, two-level
games, and democratic state relations
II. The Political Economy of Trade and Investment
Course materials
Evaluation