Regional public goods and international organizations

This article focuses on the provision prognosis for regional public goods (RPGs) and the role of international organizations in fostering supply in developing countries. All three properties of publicness—i.e., nonrivalry of benefits, nonexcludability of nonpayers, and the aggregation technology—play a role in this prognosis. The paper highlights many provision impediments, not faced by national or global public goods. When intervention is necessary, the analysis distinguishes the role of global, regional, and other institutional arrangements (e.g., networks and public-private partnerships). The pros and cons of subsidiarity are addressed. JEL codes H87 · O18 · R58     

Explaining civil protection cooperation in the EU: the contribution of public goods theory

Abstract

In recent years the European Union has taken a number of steps towards improving civil protection cooperation in Europe. European leaders regularly declare the importance of boosting cooperation to prepare for and respond to disasters and emergencies afflicting member states. Those declarations have been accompanied by a flourish of policy activity, the building of new structures, and even treaty changes. On the surface, this little-known area of European integration appears to be proceeding with great success. A closer look, however, reveals significant gaps between member states' general expressions of enthusiasm and problematic cooperation in practice. We draw upon public goods theory to explain why this might be the case; more specifically, we identify likely game-theoretic obstacles to cooperation in different areas of the civil protection field. We evaluate our theoretical propositions by examining the current state of cooperation in marine pollution response, chemical contamination management, and flood response. We find that cooperation success in practice corresponds generally, but not perfectly, with the predictions of public goods theory. Our findings offer a nuanced view of civil protection cooperation in Europe and illuminate options for improved cooperation in the future.     

Understanding European asylum cooperation under the Schengen/Dublin system: a public goods framework

Abstract

Recent developments in European Union (EU) asylum cooperation raise important questions about the nature of cooperation and the potential problems facing collective action in the realm of EU internal security. The emergence and the subsequent stability of the Schengen/Dublin system is especially puzzling, given the highly inequitable distribution of costs and benefits that this system entails among the participating states and begs the question as to why those states that are likely to face a disproportionate ‘burden’ under the system would have agreed to it. This article seeks to provide an alternative approach to answering this question by drawing on a public goods framework. We argue that a simple focus on free-riding and exploitation dynamics, as emphasized in the traditional collective action literature, falls short as an explanation and instead demonstrates how more recent theoretical contributions to the public goods literature can offer new insights into the origin and evolution in cooperation in this sensitive policy area.     

Evaluating the impact of IMF programs: A comparison of matching and instrumental-variable estimators

We examine the impact of IMF programs on economic performance in 95 developing countries over the period 1993–2002. Three macroeconomic measures of economic performance are considered: the real per capita economic growth rate, the ratio of the fiscal surplus to GDP, and the ratio of the current account surplus to GDP. Three estimation techniques are used: censored-sample, full-sample instrumental-variable, and matching. Substantively, we find little statistical support that IMF programs contemporaneously improve real economic growth in participating countries, but stronger evidence of an improvement in economic growth in years following a program. We find that both the fiscal ratio and the current-account ratio improve contemporaneously with IMF participation relative to the counterfactual, with effects in succeeding years differing little from the impact effects. We conclude that the program-effect estimates of matching and other estimators will differ largely because of the sample included in estimation. Matching by its nature excludes country episodes associated with extreme values of the propensity score, while the instrumental-variable estimator includes those. If there is heterogeneity of performance response in extreme vs. moderate cases, the estimates differ systematically between the two techniques. JEL codes F33 · F34 · C34     

Turkey and the IMF: A case study in the political economy of policy implementation

Research into IMF program implementation has usually taken the form of large sample regression analyses. A more detailed explanation is offered in this paper through a case study of program implementation in Turkey between 1999 and 2004. Our research is based on a series of in-depth interviews with policy makers, program negotiators, bureaucrats, interest groups and IMF personnel. Our results reinforce hypotheses that emerge from the theory of implementation and the large sample econometric work, but they also offer new and enhanced explanations. Program implementation depends on a range of factors which interact with one another. These include domestic political economy factors, such as the importance of special interest groups, political cohesiveness and program ownership by the government and the IMF, but also other idiosyncratic factors such as, in the case of Turkey, the existence of a crisis, the desire to join the EU and the role of influential technocrats. Our research has implications for the design of IMF programs.

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.