The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection: The Case of Software

The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual "property" and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of software "piracy" to assess the mechanisms by which the new global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are transmitted from the international to the national levels. We first consider a set of national-level factors that many scholars have shown to be important determinants of IPR policy. We then supplement the standard emphasis on domestic factors with an analysis of new transnational factors: countries' multilateral obligations under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral pressures from the United States to increase the protection of IPRs. Population-averaged panel data models are used to assess the effects of these national and transnational determinants on levels of software piracy in 80 countries from 1994 to 2002. Our results indicate that membership in the WTO and bilateral pressures from the United States—particularly pressures that offer reciprocal concessions—lead to substantial increases in levels of protection in rich and poor countries. There is, in short, a new international political economy of intellectual property.     

The Distributional Politics of Fiscal Adjustment: A Case Study of Four Northeastern States

The federal Tax Reform Act of 1986 and an unexpected economic downturn soon thereafter resulted in a divergence between actual and anticipated revenues at the state level. To cope with the resulting budget deficits, states increased taxes, decreased expenditures, or both. This paper looks at the decisions made in four Northeastern States-New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.     

Sovereign nations and global markets: modern British Conservatism and hyperglobalism

In this article we seek to trace through the major stands of British Euroscepticism and concentrate, in particular, on the importance of a powerful 'hyperglobalist' Eurosceptical strand within British Conservatism. We investigate the British Conservatives' recent divisions over European integration, against the background of the party's increasingly marginal status in British party politics. The piece also draws on findings from two recent surveys of the attitudes of British parliamentarians to European integration, carried out by the Members of Parliament Project for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). We explore how Conservative divisions of opinion are related in part to particular understandings of globalisation and regionalisation and attempt to show how globalist ideology has unexpectedly re–emphasised and bolstered the traditional nationalism of the Tory party and caused an increasingly hostile attitude amongst many British Conservatives towards the European project as it is presently constituted. We also examine recent attempts to map British Conservative Euroscepticism on to continental varieties using a mixture of ideological positioning and party system (Taggart 1998), arguing that this ignores the extent to which British Eurosceptics advance unique (in EU member state terms) hyperglobalist (rather than isolationist or protectionist) arguments in objecting to further European integration.