This research considers the transfer and institutionalisation of a corporate governance practice to the Asia-Pacific subsidiaries and joint ventures of two UK listed MNEs. The practice under consideration is a risk based system of internal control (RBSIC) that follows the recommendations made in Internal Control: Guidance for Directors on the Combined Code more generally known as the Turnbull Report or guidelines. The main contributions are three-fold. They focus on corporate governance practices below board level; the transfer of corporate governance practices across international borders; and the role of managerial agency as a key influence over institutionalisation. Through the combination of semi-structured interviews, documentation provided by the companies and secondary sources including academic papers, books and news services two case studies were developed – one main case study, consisting of eight embedded case studies – Excelsior; and a supporting case study consisting of two embedded case studies – Landmark. Three key themes emerged: First, although the degree of institutionalisation of the RBSIC differed across cases, the overarching picture was one of ceremonial adoption that had been achieved without the relatively high level of implementation proposed by Kostova and Roth (2002). Secondly, the successful institutionalisation of the RBSIC resides primarily in the individual employees at the recipient business unit. However, the transfer is embedded inside a specific national context that to differing degrees, depending on the differences between the source of the RBSIC and the individual recipient business units, interacts with three practice-specific sub-variables – causal ambiguity, practice-specific absorptive capacity and motivation of the practice recipient. Thirdly, due to over reliance on the regional RBSIC team responsible for the institutionalisation of the practice, their role as gatekeeper, standing between the source of the knowledge (corporate headquarters) and the recipient (Asia-Pacific business units), was unexpectedly a barrier to the development and institutionalisation of the practice.

Issues related to food security have long been closely tied to the dynamics of the global political economy. The latest price peak experienced in the commodities market (2007-2008) greatly affected agricultural commodities, creating significant imbalances in production and consumption. This research develops an interdisciplinary approach that links together issues of natural resource governance, development, and transformations in the global political economy to explore the ways in which countries of South America govern commodity booms. In other words, this thesis examines how these global dynamics affect the ways in which food-producing states manage the wealth produced during commodity booms and how this is wealth is subsequently distributed among different sectors of society. In South America, the recent commodity boom has led to an expansion of primary production oriented towards export markets, creating imbalances in their domestic productive structures. This thesis focuses on the production and trade of soybean in three countries of the Southern Cone: Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Following the boom, soybean production has come to dominate the agricultural sectors and overall exports of these countries, with some authors going as far as to dub this rapidly expanding industry the ‘Soybean Republic’. This research engages with cutting edge debates in International Political Economy, with a conceptual focus that draws from human geography and brings in space as both contingent and constituted by the changing productive and trade dynamics. By looking at the development of fixed infrastructure and dynamics of capital mobility, this research explores the patterns of uneven development that emerge from the expansion of the soybean complex, as well as the capacity of the Argentine, Brazilian, and Paraguayan states to govern the distribution of the profits emanating from it.

The emergence of Southern powers constitutes a defining feature of contemporary global governance. Their rising impact has been particularly evident in the Doha round of WTO negotiations where leading developing countries have come to play an increasingly important role in the negotiating process. India and South Africa are two Southern powers that played a central role in WTO negotiations during 2001-5. Acting as representatives of the global South, the two countries determined to a considerable extent the positions of developing countries in conceding to the agenda being negotiated or blocking different stages of negotiations. They also projected, however, different strategies, interests and world-views, and ultimately achieved, with varying degrees of success, their relocation within the WTO. The experience of India and South Africa in the first four years of the Doha round constitutes a framework for understanding the conditions under which Southern powers are repositioning in the global trading system and in the international political economy. To understand the role of India and South Africa in the Doha round, this thesis will deploy a synthesis of middle power approaches as the theoretical prism for analysing the trade diplomacy of the two countries. Middle power approaches offer an ensemble of conceptual categories which allow for theorising the rise of Southern powers, delineating both the nature of their influence and their broader systemic role. The middle power roles of India and South Africa will be assessed through a detailed analysis of documents and public statements in the period under examination. It will be demonstrated that during the Doha round, both countries emerged as middle powers projecting a reformist world-view of multilateral trade negotiations. Their ability to effect change was severely conditioned by the leadership provided by the two major trading powers, the US and the EU, and their own capacity to sustain broad bases of followership in the global South.

In this thesis I examine two widely held beliefs. First, I examine the belief that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the contemporary global trade regime are unjust. Second, I examine the belief that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods. The purpose of these investigations is twofold. My major aim is to elaborate an account of global trade justice that combines research in international political economy with insights drawn from moral and political theory. These two disciplines are often separated in academic research and, as such, there is a need to combine an understanding of the reality of global trade arrangements with rigorous evaluation from the point of view of political morality. This thesis undertakes this task by engendering synergy between these literatures on the WTO and Fair Trade. The selection of these topics also provides a chance to subject the aforementioned beliefs to rigorous moral analysis. This is the second rationale for the project. In brief, my arguments are as follows. I argue that there are demands of global justice. I argue that this requires the WTO to meet certain democratic standards and certain demands of economic justice. I argue that the WTO does not meet these demands and I propose according reforms. I argue that the WTO must offer member-states substantively equal participation rights and that it should enact a policy structuring the global economic framework so as to help finance the development of welfare and legal provisions in developing countries. In addition, I make two arguments in relation to the belief that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods. I reject one common defence of this idea but I argue that individuals should purchase Fair Trade goods because in doing so they can help generate a widespread contribution to addressing important moral concerns.

Energy is required to manufacture a good or create a service and the energy sector is the backbone of every economy. Until recently, governments worldwide have considered the energy sector too cmcial to be left to market forces. Accordingly, energy markets have been fragmented and segmented into national and highly protected markets. Likewise, international trade in energy has traditionally been synonymous with petroleum trade, which in turn has been effectively regulated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), outside the reach of the multilateral trading system. However, the past two decades have seen the emergence of a trend towards the introduction of the trade discourse into the energy sector. This trend has two main components. The first component has its roots in the efforts made at the bilateral, regional, and international levels to impose GATT-type and even GATT-plus disciplines on energy trade. In this regard, mention may be made of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, the NAFTA agreement, and the Energy Charter Treaty. The second component, initially originated at the national level, has been the deregulation movement, namely reforming the electricity and natural gas industries. As a result of this policy shift, the electricity and national gas industries have been evolving from monopolistic into competitive industries with increasing numbers and types of participants. Accordingly, trade in electricity and gas is a new dimension of trade in energy, which is particularly relevant to the trade in services debate. It should be noted, however, that the GATS ongoing energy services negotiations also include the liberalization of oil and gas field services, which are related to the upstream segment of the oil and natural gas industries. Two WTO agreements, namely the GATT and the GATS, are of particular importance in analysing these components. Furthermore, in order to give the full picture of the current energy trade debate, the dual pricing debate and the relevant developments of the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement and their potential implications for trade in energy-intensive products should also be examined. The purpose of this study is to explore in extensive detail the two aforementioned components that shape the current energy debate. It is aimed at analysing the relationship between these components in the context of the energy trade discourse. The overall aim is to provide a better understanding of the processes and trends relating to this complex, multidimensional and dynamic subject and to identify how and to what extent trade in energy is integrated into the world trading system. Some tentative observations are also made with the desire to point towards the next steps.

It is commonly assumed that armed conflict deters foreign direct investment (FDI) and encourages capital flight and portfolio substitution, yet recent evidence suggests that foreign investors are not uniformly risk-adverse with respect to investments in conflict zones. The willingness of foreign investors to put funds at risk in conflict zones runs counter to the conventional wisdom in the academic literature, which is based on the proposition that armed conflict is bad for business. The complex relationship between armed conflict and FDI presents a counterintuitive research puzzle for the fields of security studies and international political economy, both of which assume that armed conflict increases ‘capital flight’ as mobile foreign investors seek more stable returns elsewhere. This thesis uses a multi-method approach that incorporates a large-\(N\) study based on descriptive statistics as well as a structured focused comparison of internal armed conflicts in Iraq (2003-2010) and Afghanistan (2003-2012) that followed US-led military campaigns in order to address the question: \(Why\) \(do\) \(countries\) \(involved\) \(in\) \(internal\) \(armed\) \(conflict\) \(continue\) \(to\) \(attract\) \(FDI?\) In contrast to many of the cases in the large-\(N\) study, the small-\(n\) comparative analysis focuses on two cases in which an external military campaign preceded the emergence of intra-state violence. The investigation of FDI in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq is significant because each country experienced a counterinsurgency against the external military intervention, which would be expected to further increase the risk premium for foreign investors. The thesis offers new analytical insights on the armed conflict-FDI relationship through investigating the reasons why foreign investors may decide to invest in countries affected by on-going armed conflict. The central argument presented in this thesis is that the presence of an external military intervention (EMI) involving ‘boots on the ground’ sends a positive signal about improvements in a country’s investment climate, thereby altering how foreign investors assess the risks associated with investment in conflict zones.

My thesis, a theoretical-based work, concerns the effects of globalisation and tourism in context of Thailand, which the selected case studies are Damnoen Saduak and Pattaya Floating Markets. I particularly look at Baudrillard's theory to investigate to what extent his concept fits in context of Thailand. Also, my work uses Baudrillard's theory to study and conceptualise the effects of globalisation on Thailand's tourism.

This Thesis has two themes: (1) political economy of international trade and factor mobility policy; (2) the robustness of strategic trade and industrial policy. Chapter 1 is a non-technical introduction of my research. In Chapter 2, Double-edged incentive competition for FDI, we study the impact of special interest lobbying on competition between two countries for a multinational in a common agency framework. \Ve address the following questions. On the positive side, is special interest lobbying a determinant of competition for FDI? If so, how does it work? How does it affect the equilibrium price for attracting FDI? On the normative side, what are the welfare effects of FDI competition when special interest lobbying is present? Is allocative efficiency always achieved? We argue that special interest lobbying provides an extra political incentive for a government to attract FDI. We show that compared to the benchmark case when governments maximize national welfare, now (1) an economically disadvantageous country has a chance to win the competition; (2) the equilibrium price for attracting FDI is higher than in the benchmark case; (3) allocative efficiency cannot be always achieved. In Chapter 3, Advertising in a differentiated duopoly and its policy implications for an open economy, we develop a model of advertising in a differentiated duopoly in which firms first decide how much to invest in cooperative or predatory advertising and then engage in product market competition (Cournot or Bertrand). We then use this model, with the type of advertising endogenously determined, to explore the policy implications in the context of a Brander-Spencer third-country model of strategic trade. Among results derived from this model, most interestingly we show that for a range of parameter values we get robust trade policy in which governments always use a trade subsidy irrespective of the type of advertising or form of market competition. In Chapter 4, Is export subsidy a robust trade policy recommendation towards a unionized duopoly, we argue that although previous researches imply that the robust trade policy recommendation towards a unionized duopoly is an export subsidy, we cannot get such a result even in the linear case if the opportunity cost of public funds is sufficiently high. However, if we consider the case where the domestic firm and the trade union lobby the government to set their favorable trade policies by giving the government political contributions (modeled in a common agency setting), then the result of robustness will be restored if the government cares about the political contributions sufficiently relative to national welfare. See Chapter 5 for some technical proofs.

This thesis explores the continuities and change in the conduct of Russian foreign policy in the Caspian region in the period 1991-2008 with the central focus set on the inclusion of energy both as a tool and one of the main targets of Russian foreign policy during the Putin administration. More specifically it looks at the impact that the choice to establish Russia as an energy superpower based mainly on its oil and gas sectors during this period had on the conduct of Russian foreign policy in the Caspian region. The central research question is how Russian oil and gas companies are used as foreign policy tools in the conduct of Russian foreign energy policy within the current foreign energy policy framework and to what end. The argument of this thesis is based on the hypothesis that the Russian state uses its oil and gas companies in order to infiltrate the Central Asian energy markets and assert its economic hegemony in the region through a web of legal and contractual monopolies aiming at maintaining Russia’s economic hegemony in the Caspian and contributing to one of Russia’s main energy policy priority of becoming an influential player in the global energy markets.