There has been growing debate about whether bilateral trade agreements are damaging multilateral efforts to eliminate barriers to international trade. This paper develops a model in which trading blocs always charge optimal tariffs and make trade agreements based on strategic considerations. We...

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or ``universalism'') of the provision of regional...

The abandonment of China’s relatively isolationism from the global economy has given rise to a growing interest in the relationship between political and economic space in contemporary China. In particular, increased economic interaction between Southern China, Hong Kong and Taiwan has...

The abiding impression of Japan's involvement in and response to the East Asian currency crisis is one of sorry failure. Japan stands accused of purveying a defective developmental state model of growth to the East Asian states--over-dependent for its functioning upon exports, inflows of...

As a consequence of the financial crises of 1997-9, the question of ‘global governance’ appears to have come into its own as an ‘agenda’ for thinking about the rules and norms which underpin the present global order. One of the dominant understandings of the public domain, especially in...

We derive the sub-game perfect Nash equilibria for the foreign direct investment (FDI) game played between two unionised firms. Among other results, we show that FDI is less likely, ceteris paribus, the greater is union bargaining power, the stronger the weight the union attaches to wages, and...

Recent work has suggested that the discontent over perceived negative impacts arising from liberalisation and globalisation need to be more carefully considered. The critiques emanating from non-governmental organisations and social movements are considered to be amongst the most significant....

This paper traces the growth of Chinese exports in the post-Mao era, and the implications for policy making within China. The first part of the paper provides a statistical overview of the growth in Chinese trade since 1978, and suggests that this growth was achieved through a combination of two...

The current banking crisis in Japan illustrates two major points. The first is the renewed emphasis on the importance of market-based solutions to policy problems by American policy makers. The second is the broader point, that differences in the structures and operation of capitalism persist in...

This paper considers a class of two-player dynamic games in which each player controls a one-dimensional variable which we interpret as a level of cooperation. In the base model, there is an irreversibility constraint stating that this variable can never be reduced, only increased. It otherwise...