Associate Professor of Political Science
Border Crossing: Exchange
Rate Movements and the Demand for Protection
International
political economy rests on issue-specific
models of trade politics and exchange rate politics. The private actors
we model,
however, do not always respect the borders we draw around these issue
areas. As
I demonstrate, firms react to exchange rate movements by demanding
trade protection.
Consequently, we need to begin to replace issue-specific models with
more general
models of international political economy. This paper takes initial
steps in
this direction by incorporating exchange rate movements into the
standard
Ricardo-Viner endogenous tariff model. In this framework, exchange rate
movements change the trade policy preferences of a subset of firms.
Consequently, demands for protection rise as the currency strengthens
and
diminish as the currency weakens. I test the hypothesis using two
measures of
administered protection petition filings in the
Who Borrows?
Political Inclusiveness and the
Accumulation
of Foreign Debt in Developing Societies
Why do some developing country governments accumulate large foreign debts while others do not? I hypothesize that variation in foreign borrowing is a function of variation in the breadth of public participation in the political process. Specifically, governments borrow less when political institutions enable broad public participation in the political process and encourage the revelation of information about executive behavior. I test this hypothesis against the experience of seventy-eight developing countries between 1976 and 1998. The analysis suggests that governments in societies with broad public participation borrow less heavily than governments in societies with limited public participation. In short, democracies borrowed less heavily than autocracies. The analysis has implications for the likely consequences of the recent debt relief initiative.