<p>This research shows the relationship between trade liberalization and food security for the Bolivian case. As a result of the severe economic crisis of the early-1980s, Bolivia adopted a series of market-oriented reforms in 1985. The reforms included the liberalization of the trade regime and the promotion of non-traditional exports. The trade liberalization had an important effect on the performance of cash crops, especially in the development of the soybeans industry. However, food crops did not have such a great dynamics. Vegetables and starchy roots declined in per capita terms and the increase in imports were not enough to compensate the decline. Trade reforms mostly favored a small group of large-scale farmers in the lowlands, who had historically been granted land in the region. In this sense, Bolivia’s involvement in a trade liberalization process has not been reflected in an overall improvement of the country’s food security.</p>

<p>Departing from the case of textile and clothing trade dispute between the EU and China in 2005, it has been noticed that the EU’s policy in textile trade to a large extent has been situated in a position of dilemma. On the one hand, the growing global impetus of liberalization in the sector forces the EU to open up its market to cheap textile imports from the developing countries; on the other hand, the fierce protectionist pressures come from the domestic producers and slow down the paces towards liberalization, or sometimes even take setback towards more conservative performances. By placing this case in a broader context, the EU’s external trade policy is confronted with the similar dilemma, swaying between the trade liberalization and trade protection. Consequently, does the EU emerge in the current multilateral trading system of the WTO as a force for trade liberalization or a force for trade protectionism?</p><p>Bearing this question in mind, the general climate of global trade under the GATT/WTO and the EU’s external trade policy will firstly be examined. Then, the EU’s trade protectionism is about to be explained by strategic trade theory, the high political content of the EU’s external trade policy and the fragmentation in the EU’s policy networks; while the EU’s inclination towards trade liberalization will be explained by the implications from the conventional trade theory and new institutionalism, and as well as the impacts from the general climate of global trade.</p><p>The results shows that the EU’s external trade policy under the global trade liberalization is a mixture, neither pure liberalization nor pure protectionism. With regard to the trade issues concerning to the vital interests, the Union without exception inclines to conservative protectionism; whereas concerning the issues of less importance, compromises and concessions always lead the outcomes of the policy to the inspiring liberalization.</p>

<p>Traditionally, the promotion of socio-economic justice has been seen as an exclusive concern for the state and its citizens. Many contemporary political thinkers criticize this view and argue that the principles of justice which apply within a state also apply to the global level. Further, they often argue that this conclusion is strengthened by the increased level of interconnectedness between people and states created by globalization. It is said that even if principles of justice are constrained by institutional boundaries, these boundaries no longer coincide with state borders but rather extend transnationally, or even globally. In this thesis it is argued that the impacts on justice inferred from globalization are often seriously overstated. The demand for socio-economic justice is created exclusively by a special relationship between citizens. This relationship is constituted by a common membership in the kind of coercive institutional structure epitomized by the state. Under current state of affairs, state coercion has no counterpart in the global arena. The conclusion is that concerns of socio-economic justice should be reserved for the domestic arena. Yet, it is also argued that justice is pluralistic and other kinds of concern are applicable on a global scale. Issues of fairness in international trade are discussed as examples of such concerns, and it is concluded that the international trade regime should institutionalize a number of safeguards that reduce the vulnerability of developing states.</p>

Traditionally, the promotion of socio-economic justice has been seen as an exclusive concern for the state and its citizens. Many contemporary political thinkers criticize this view and argue that the principles of justice which apply within a state also apply to the global level. Further, they often argue that this conclusion is strengthened by the increased level of interconnectedness between people and states created by globalization. It is said that even if principles of justice are constrained by institutional boundaries, these boundaries no longer coincide with state borders but rather extend transnationally, or even globally. In this thesis it is argued that the impacts on justice inferred from globalization are often seriously overstated. The demand for socio-economic justice is created exclusively by a special relationship between citizens. This relationship is constituted by a common membership in the kind of coercive institutional structure epitomized by the state. Under current state of affairs, state coercion has no counterpart in the global arena. The conclusion is that concerns of socio-economic justice should be reserved for the domestic arena. Yet, it is also argued that justice is pluralistic and other kinds of concern are applicable on a global scale. Issues of fairness in international trade are discussed as examples of such concerns, and it is concluded that the international trade regime should institutionalize a number of safeguards that reduce the vulnerability of developing states.

This research shows the relationship between trade liberalization and food security for the Bolivian case. As a result of the severe economic crisis of the early-1980s, Bolivia adopted a series of market-oriented reforms in 1985. The reforms included the liberalization of the trade regime and the promotion of non-traditional exports. The trade liberalization had an important effect on the performance of cash crops, especially in the development of the soybeans industry. However, foodcrops did not have such a great dynamics. Vegetables and starchy roots declined in per capita terms and the increase in imports were not enough to compensate the decline. Trade reforms mostly favor a small group of large-scale farmers in the lowlands, who had historically been granted land in the region. In this sense, Bolivia’s involvement in a trade liberalization process was not reflected in an overall improvement of the country’s food security.

The aim of this study is to examine socio-economic transformation and gender relations in Lao PDR after the adoption of economic liberalization by the Lao government in the late 1980s. Against a background of general socio-economic transformation in Laos the main focus of the study is on the local level, with emphasis on how people in their everyday lives have engaged with and handled the changes. The application of economic liberalization shaped new conditions for people in local communities, and various livelihoods strategies were adopted under the new circumstances. The study examines gender relations, livelihoods and actors of change in two different contexts of globalization. The first context is the case of foreign direct investment in the Sepone mine, the largest gold-copper mine in the country located in Vilabury district, Savannakhet province. Five villages located close to the mine and directly affected by the operation were chosen as research site. The second case is the context of international tourism development in the small town of Vang Vieng, situated halfway between Vientiane Capital and the world heritage town of Luangprabang. The purpose with the two case studies is to examine how changes take place in different places of the same country under the same political direction and development policy. The study is inspired by theories of space and place and the view that phenomena are place-based and different places are constituted by different socio-spatial relations. The findings show that profound changes took place both in the economic and social-cultural spheres, including in gender relations. The two contexts experienced different processes of changes: in the context of Vilabury district, the transformation was produced through top-down development and created a dependency pattern where new social inequalities and social stratification emerged through unequal access to the new resources of the villagers. In the context of Vang Vieng and the expansion of international tourism, the development process proceeded more through a bottom-up pattern; the villagers perceived they were important actors of development, had more equal access to resources and could define livelihood strategies by themselves.

(None) Technical Summary of Thesis: The topic of my thesis is currency crisis. Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of the international economy from the invention of paper money. They are not confined to particular economies or specific region. They take place in developed, emerging, and developing countries and are spread all over the globe. Countries that experience currency crises face economic losses that can be huge and disruptive. However, the exacted toll is not only financial and economic, but also human, social, and political. It is clear that the currency crisis is a real threat to financial stability and economic prosperity. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the determinants of currency crises for twenty OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. It systematically examines the role of economic fundamentals and contagion in the origins of currency crises and empirically attempts to identify the channels through which the crises are being transmitted. It also examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. The first chapter identifies the episodes of currency crisis in our data set. Determining true crisis periods is a vital step in the empirical studies and has direct impact on the reliability of their estimations and the relevant policy implications. We define a period as a crisis episode when the Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index, which consists of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates, exceeds a threshold. In order to minimize the concerns regarding the accuracy of identified crisis episodes, we apply extreme value theory, which is a more objective approach compared to other methods. In this chapter, we also select the reference country, which a country’s currency pressure index should be built around, in a more systematic way rather than by arbitrary choice or descriptive reasoning. The second chapter studies the probability of a currency exiting a tranquil state into a crisis state. There is an extensive literature on currency crises that empirically evaluate the roots and causes of the crises. Despite the interesting results of the current empirical literature, only very few of them account for the influence of time on the probability of crises. We use duration models that rigorously incorporate the time factor into the likelihood functions and allow us to investigate how the amount of time that a currency has already spent in the tranquil state affects the stability of a currency. Our findings show that high values of volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors (which mostly work through trade channels), unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy increases the hazard of a crisis. We make use of several robustness checks, including running our models on two different crisis episodes sets that are identified based on monthly and quarterly type spells. The third chapter examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. As in our previous paper, duration analysis is our methodology to study the probability of a currency crisis occurrence under different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility policies. The third chapter finds that there is a significant link between the choice of exchange rate regime and the incidence of currency crises in our sample. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive to the choice of the de facto exchange rate system. Moreover, in our sample, capital control policies appear to be helpful in preventing low duration currency crises. The results are robust to a wide variety of sample and models checks.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the democratization process in Kurdistan on the basis of consolidation democracy with focus on arenas defined by Linz and Stepan (1997), namely economic, political, legal, civil society and arenas of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, I intend to explain Kurdistan’s road toward democratization in Kurdistan from 1991 until today, with a focus on the years 2003-2012. The main results are that Kurdistan has developed conditions that support a future consolidation of democracy. However, there are weaknesses in the economic situation, rule of law and the arena of bureaucracy. The arena of the political and civil society grew stronger after the US war on Iraq in 2003 and as effect new institutions such as political parties, opposition, election, political governance and alliances arose.

The Turkish Electricity System has gone through a liberalization process. This study aims to analyze the possible outcomes of this process by using a simulation framework. First, we look at the basics of new market design and focus on international evidence. Second, the theoretical and empirical literature about the liberalization of the electricity sector is reviewed. Then, the structure of our model, Turkish Electricity System Simulation Model (TESS), is summarized. In this model, it is assumed that a spot market is formed and all the agents in the sector operate in this market. Using this model, the effects of various factors, like industry structure, consumer participation and regulation, upon the performance of the spot market are analyzed. Moreover, in simulation case studies, uniform and a non-uniform pricing mechanisms are compared.

(None) Technical Summary of Thesis: The topic of my thesis is currency crisis. Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of the international economy from the invention of paper money. They are not confined to particular economies or specific region. They take place in developed, emerging, and developing countries and are spread all over the globe. Countries that experience currency crises face economic losses that can be huge and disruptive. However, the exacted toll is not only financial and economic, but also human, social, and political. It is clear that the currency crisis is a real threat to financial stability and economic prosperity. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the determinants of currency crises for twenty OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. It systematically examines the role of economic fundamentals and contagion in the origins of currency crises and empirically attempts to identify the channels through which the crises are being transmitted. It also examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. The first chapter identifies the episodes of currency crisis in our data set. Determining true crisis periods is a vital step in the empirical studies and has direct impact on the reliability of their estimations and the relevant policy implications. We define a period as a crisis episode when the Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index, which consists of changes in exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates, exceeds a threshold. In order to minimize the concerns regarding the accuracy of identified crisis episodes, we apply extreme value theory, which is a more objective approach compared to other methods. In this chapter, we also select the reference country, which a country’s currency pressure index should be built around, in a more systematic way rather than by arbitrary choice or descriptive reasoning. The second chapter studies the probability of a currency exiting a tranquil state into a crisis state. There is an extensive literature on currency crises that empirically evaluate the roots and causes of the crises. Despite the interesting results of the current empirical literature, only very few of them account for the influence of time on the probability of crises. We use duration models that rigorously incorporate the time factor into the likelihood functions and allow us to investigate how the amount of time that a currency has already spent in the tranquil state affects the stability of a currency. Our findings show that high values of volatility of unemployment rates, inflation rates, contagion factors (which mostly work through trade channels), unemployment rates, real effective exchange rate, trade openness, and size of economy increases the hazard of a crisis. We make use of several robustness checks, including running our models on two different crisis episodes sets that are identified based on monthly and quarterly type spells. The third chapter examines the links between the incidence of currency crises and the choice of exchange rate regimes as well as the impact of capital market liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises. As in our previous paper, duration analysis is our methodology to study the probability of a currency crisis occurrence under different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility policies. The third chapter finds that there is a significant link between the choice of exchange rate regime and the incidence of currency crises in our sample. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive to the choice of the de facto exchange rate system. Moreover, in our sample, capital control policies appear to be helpful in preventing low duration currency crises. The results are robust to a wide variety of sample and models checks.