The main goal of the thesis is to develop an understanding of the history of international society, reinterpreting it as the uneven and combined development of capitalism. It is argued that uneven and combined development is the historical form that capitalism has taken in expanding international society. The way in which each individual society was integrated into the expanding international society depended on the local conditions and how this fed into the international context set by an already-existing world market and states-system. When subjected to the pressures of capitalist expansion, states attempted to quickly consolidate their power and increase revenue by developing their productive capacity through copying the methods of production and political organisation which had made Europe so strong. This produced a particular model of development in that advanced forms were often grafted onto pre-existing structures. The experience of this creates the particular context in which political action takes place. The case studies of Egypt and Vietnam provide two local comparative applications of the theory. Each case study shows, through historical reconstruction, how the history of international society and the history of individual societies are intertwined. It will also show that in both cases the experience of uneven and combined development created a particular distorted and twisted class structure which meant that social and political instability was built in. By charting their different experiences an explanation is provided for the two very different routes they took: in Egypt's case - a nationalist military coup d'etat, and in Vietnam's case - Communist revolution and war. But the theory goes further than just providing an analysis of domestic instabilities, it also shows how it is the management of these very instabilities which has dominated the policies and actions of the major powers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This thesis employs the CGE approach to appraise three distinctive issues. Using hypothetical data, Essay 1 estimates how customs union outcomes are sensitive to market size and competitiveness. Further, common external tariffs are adjusted to ensure necessarily welfare-improving outcomes, thereby completely eliminating trade diversion. The results confirm that members’ gains are proportional to the union size, and the degree of market competition significantly alters the welfare outcome. Once common external tariffs are endogenised, members gain less while the whole world gains more as non-members become unaffected by trade diversion. Essay 2 assesses the FTAs Thailand has reached with Japan, China, India, Australia and New Zealand. The model constructed in Essay 1 is extended to accommodate the GTAP 6.0 database. It explicitly determines commodity market competition by sector and labour market paradigm by skill level to better reflect economic reality. Among these FTAs, JTEPA is the best, whilst TNZCEPA is the least beneficial FTA for Thailand. The gains from bilateral FTAs are trivial compared to those from the groupings that include ASEAN. Overall, trade diversion is offset by trade creation, thus the world finds all of the Thailand’s FTAs welfare-improving, albeit marginal. Essay 3 evaluates tax issues for India. It investigates the implications of domestic tax hikes tailored for the rebalancing of government revenue after an FTA among ASEAN, India, China and Japan. Income tax emerges as most effective, whereas production tax appears as least favourable. However, once taking into account the existence of untaxable economic activities, the most benign options measured by real output become consumption, production, income, and factor input taxes, respectively. Hence, the introduction of the substitution elasticity between taxable and untaxable goods largely alters the outcomes, and the informal sector ought not to be neglected if the government is to gauge true effects of domestic tax tools.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how and by what paths a developing economy like Korea builds a competitive and innovative capital goods sector. The enquiry focuses on the role of user firms in shaping the dynamics of machine tools innovation. It develops the hypotheses that the users, on the one hand, create a basis for the specialised suppliers to embark on a dynamic path to innovation through investment activities and on the other, they become involved directly in the development and commercialisation of machine tools; and that such user activities have a positive impact on the building up of competitive advantage not only for users themselves but for specialised suppliers. In order to confinn the hypotheses, this thesis carries out empirical investigations into Japan and Korea. It analyses quantitative data at the industry level with some firm-specific information for the Japanese case, while it analyses the results of a field survey for the Korean case. The results show that the users in both countries, represented by car makers, appear to have involved themselves in the technological and entrepreneurial entry into machine tools along with making active investments. In consequence, they made a considerable contribution to machine tools innovation, increasing the competitive advantage for the machine tool sector as well as user sectors in both countries. This thesis also attempts to apply the hypotheses to an international-level analysis. It develops the notion that the international differences in the investment of local user sectors explain the international asymmetries of machine tools innovation, bringing the consequence of the differences in the competitiveness of the machine tool sector as well as its user sectors. Cross-country analyses are conducted in order to test the notion. The results reveal that the intercountry variations in the investment performance in national user sectors are closely associated with the international gaps in machine tools innovation, which in tum significantly explain the variations of the export performance between countries in both the machine tool sector and its user sectors. These theoretical and empirical analyses produce many useful policy implications for developing the capital goods sector of Korea as well as other developing countries. They also contribute to the understanding of the dynamic process of industrial innovation and so to the development of innovation theory. In addition, the study yields an insight into why Japan has succeeded in a large area of user sectors and the machine tool sector over a short period of time.

The UAE is a small capital-rich country short in indigenous manpower, both skilled and unskilled. However, it has an unlimited supply of foreign manpower. Indigenes constitute about a fourth of the population, one tenth of the total workforce, but only 2% of the industrial workforce. Industrialization is the main avenue for development and in the post-oil era various public sector projects have been set up including oil refineries, gas liquefaction plants, a fertilizer plant, an aluminium smelter and cement factories, as well as smaller private sector factories for building materials, consumer and food products, etc. Industries suffer from local competition due to duplication of projects caused by lack of co-ordination between the emirates and from foreign competition due to lack of protection since the State has a free trade policy. Although industries do not suffer from manpower shortages, the lack of indigenous skilled manpower is a national problem since the industrial sector is controlled by foreigners. Xoreover, one of the aims of industrialization should be the development of a skilled national workforce that can generate the national income after the oil is exhausted. The rapid expansion in education has been with little planning. There has also been little economic and work-market planning and no co-ordination with educational planning. Government guarantees jobs to uni versi ty graduates at above market wages as a welfare-oriented oil income distribution policy. Therefore, local graduates avoid working for industry, particularly the private sector. There are only 3 industrial schools and industrial students equal 2% of general secondary education students. Furthermore, industrial school graduates work mainly for employers s~ch as the police and army and often not in their specialiZations. The UAE has thus failed to develop productive human resources and to benefit from its industrial education which is more expensive than general education.

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