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Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Peri Da Silva / It is usually preached by economists that trade should be free, but in reality, it is almost always chained. The reason for this discrepancy lies in the fact that trade policies are set in political contexts in which policy makers have different objective function than maximizing economic efficiency. So, endogenous protection literature evolved around the ideas and reasons to explain trade policy as determined under specific political contexts. The early empirical work until late 1980s examined the correlation between different political factors and trade policies. These works were helpful in identifying relative importance of political economy variables, but were criticized to have specifications which were loosely linked with the theories behind them. In recent years with development of theoretical platforms, study of political economy of trade policy has moved to a more structured direction and empirical investigations have been done to link real world data with the model predictions. In this regard, Median Voter model and Grossman-Helpman (GH) model are the main branches of literature. Median Voter model predicts positive tariffs in capital-abundant countries and negative tariffs in labor-abundant ones, but in real world, negative tariffs are rare. Empirical investigation of this model tries to reconcile observed trade policies with median voter model and two of these studies are included in this report. Interest group model is the framework of Grossman-Helpman model in which the effect of organized lobbies in trade policy determination is taken into account. Two empirical studies of this model showed that real world data support this model. By employing modifications in GH model, researchers try to account for factors like lobbying competition and foreign lobbying in explaining data. These results show that foreign lobbying is not necessarily against trade and ignoring lobbying competition may lead to wrong conclusions about welfare mindedness of government.

Titel: Googles sökmotor på lokal nivå – En kvalitativ studie om hur fem mäklar- och fastighetsbyråer i Halmstad förhåller sig till Googles sökmotor i deras digitala kommunikation. Författare: Emma Holmberg och Andreas Good Handledare: Linus Andersson Examinator: Malin Hallén Typ av arbete: Kandidatuppsats Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur anställda på fem mäklar- och fastighetsbyråer i Halmstad upplever att de använder Googles sökmotor i deras digitala kommunikation. Syftet är vidare att bidra till en bättre förståelse för Googles makt på en mikronivå. Frågeställningar: - Vilka möjligheter och utmaningar med Googles sökmotor upplever de anställda på de undersökta mäklar- och fastighetsbyråerna i deras digitala kommunikation? - Hur kan mäklar- och fastighetsbyråernas relation till Googles sökmotor förstås utifrån teorier om nätverksmakt och gatekeeping på internet? Antal ord: 16351 Metod och material: Studien bygger på kvalitativ metod där fem individuella samtalsintervjuer har genomförts. Slutsatser: Studiens huvudsakliga slutsatser visar att informanterna upplever Googles sökmotor som en stor och viktig aktör i deras digitala kommunikation. Vidare visar slutsatserna att Google styr mäklar- och fastighetsbyråerna genom att diktera och bestämma villkoren på sökmotorn. Nyckelord: Google, Googles sökmotor, nätverksmakt, gatekeeping, political economy.

Thesis advisor: David A. Deese / Cross-national differences in regulation have become the most significant barrier to international trade. My dissertation attempts to explain why states sometimes choose to reduce these regulatory trade barriers but at other times choose to maintain or increase them. To do this, I examine the international negotiation over regulatory trade barriers in three in-depth case studies, one from each of the three main areas of the international trade in goods: manufacturing, agriculture, and high-technology. The first investigates consumer safety, labor-related domestic content, and environmental regulations in the trade in automobiles in North America and the European Union. The second analyzes mad-cow safety regulations and the trade in beef between the United States and Japan. The third examines intellectual property regulations and the trade in pharmaceuticals between the United States and India. I contend that the best way to explain this variation is by examining the motivations of three sets of actors (businesses, activists, and government officials) and the political bargaining between those three groups. Businesses seek to reduce regulatory barriers when those barriers raise production costs or inhibit market access. They may however choose to end that pursuit if those regulations are cheap to comply with or pursuing their reduction carries major reputational risk. Activists defend regulatory barriers when they perceive those regulations to be the sole effective means to address a societal problem they are concerned about. They may accept a reduction in regulatory barriers if those barriers have low salience or their opposition is bought out through private standards, corporate social responsibility, or some other arrangement in which businesses are not directly regulated by government. Government officials choose whether to side with businesses or activist groups based on their relative prioritization of trade and regulatory independence, their staffing, and whom they identify as their core constituency. Businesses are likely to succeed at reducing a regulatory trade barrier when they can link their desire for that reduction with broader concerns about economic competitiveness while activist organizations are likely to succeed at defending regulatory trade barriers when they can link their desire for maintaining or increasing that barrier with preventing needless death. This dissertation thus adds to the current understanding of international political economy by demonstrating that multinational corporations have less political power than is commonly assumed and by augmenting traditional explanations of trade politics based on economic cleavages through analyzing activists’ engagement in trade politics now that trade politics significantly affects regulations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis (M.Com. (Development Theory and Policy))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2014. / Mozambique is currently moving from an aid dependent country to mineral dependent given the mining boom happening there thanks to the discoveries of huge reserves of coal, mineral sands and natural gas. The country is set to become one of the world's twenty top producers of natural gas and top ten largest producers of coal. This research is a case study focusing on coal-based linkages that can foster broad economic growth and development in Mozambique. Using a political economy perspective, the research investigates the question about how the country can optimise the mining boom through coalbased economic linkages to foster broader socio-economic development. The research finds that under the combination of its current fiscal and mineral regime with infrastructure problems plus the inexistence of a coal-based linkage policy, Mozambique will get negligible benefit from the exploitation of its finite coal resources. A major overhaul of these regimes is needed for it to make use of its coal to catalyse wider growth and development, before it is left with little other than large holes in the ground.

The rst chapter uses a unique dataset on Brazilian party members and variation from mayoral elections to examine the determinants of party membership in Brazil. It starts by examining the effect of winning office on the membership of political parties at the local level. The effect of interest is identi ed using a differences-indifferences approach that compares changes in membership of parties that assume office with changes in membership of all other political parties registered in a municipality. The results indicate that winning office increases the membership of the party of the mayor by 0:5%. In addition, political alignment with higher levels of government has a signifi cant effect on the membership of the mayoral candidate party. Finally, the paper documents that party switching is one of the drivers of the estimated increase in membership. The paper offers evidence in favor of the hypothesis that party membership is driven by opportunistic motives in addition to ideology. The second chapter combines data on the universe of recipients of the Bolsa Famlia program from 2005 to 2015 with data on party membership to investigate the returns to political loyalty. Speci cally, it uses variation from mayoral elections to investigate whether members of political parties that assume office at the local level are more likely to receive social transfers. Regression results from an IV estimation show that indeed members of the party that gained access to municipal government are signifi cantly more likely to receive the benefi t. Additionally, it finds no evidence that members of parties that did not win office are more likely to lose the benefi t as a result of the electoral defeat. This chapter offers direct evidence of material rewards to party membership. The last chapter focuses on the impact of pay transparency on earnings inequality in the Brazilian public sector. Differences-in-differences estimates show that the disclosure of wages reduced the 90/50 decile wage gap across municipalities located in states that adopted wage transparency in comparison to those located in states that did not adopt the policy. There is also no evidence that earnings decile gaps below the median were affected by the salary transparency policy, which indicates that the effect of disclosure in the public sector was mainly concentrated at the upper tail of the log earnings distribution. Finally, evidence presented suggests that the effect on inequality compression is the result of lower returns to top paid occupations rather than changes in employment. The paper suggests that at the margin, top paid public sector employees are insensitive to changes in their earnings, indicating that there are rents that accrue to holding these positions.

In this article, Immanuel Wallerstein tries to anticipate the evolution of world conflicts and structures over the next decades. In his analysis, he identifies three main cleavages which structure future global conflicts: the triadic cleavage between the United States, Europe and Japan, who compete economically; the North-South cleavage between core zones and the periphery of the world economy; and, finally, the cleavage between what he calls the "Spirit of Davos" and the "Spirit of Porto Alegre" as a conflict between alternative images of the future world order. The structure and the dynamics of each cleavage are analysed and their evolution over the next decades is anticipated.

Publicly financed dental care has recently increased its profile as a health policy issue in Canada. The media have championed the challenges experienced by low-income groups in accessing dental care. Governments across the country have responded with targeted funds. Social concern has even promoted the Canadian Medical Association to call for the inclusion of dental care within Medicare, and in changing a policy position that is over one hundred years old, the Canadian Dental Association now recommends that governments establish a dental safety net for all disadvantaged Canadians. In this environment, important questions have emerged: Why did Canada never incorporate dental care into Medicare? How have governments been involved in dental care? What are governments doing now? What are the disparities in oral health and dental care? What gaps exist in the system? What does the profession think? What does the public think? Through a document review, administrative survey, expenditure trend analysis, and public and professional opinion surveys, this dissertation answered these questions with the aim of clarifying the many issues that surround publicly financed dental care in Canada. It appears that dental care was not included in Medicare due to material and ideological reasons; namely decreases in dental caries and human resource limitations, the belief in viable options to large-scale service delivery, and the belief that maintaining one’s oral health and the ability to seek out dental care are individual responsibilities, not social ones. As such, there has developed in policy and programming a predilection to support dental care for children, for social assistance recipients, for seniors, and for select marginalised groups, or those groups where personal responsibility is not totalising. There is also a bias, developed over the last thirty years, towards structuring publicly financed dental care in private ways. This has resulted in a system that has certain biases, inconsistencies, and gaps, such that it cannot clearly and fully respond to current disparities. It is in the conciliation of public and private approaches to care that publicly financed dental care can achieve a stable footing and a clear direction forward.

With the rise of the knowledge economy and aging population, advanced industrial countries seek to address their skill shortage and promote national skill bases through highly skilled migration. As a result, recruiting international students, especially those at tertiary levels, has been integrated into national strategies to compete for global talent. In spite of the widely recognized significance of recruiting international students to a high skill economy, the uneven growth in foreign enrolments among host countries, geographically oriented source regions and destinations of the students, and limited post-graduate stay rates suggest important questions about governments commitment to attracting and retaining international students. A main purpose of this comparative study is to identify and assess specific national strategies and their goals of managing international student mobility. Changes in international student policies, in particular entry and immigration regulations, and the trends in student mobility in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom since the 1990s are examined drawing on secondary data. The results suggest that rather than strictly relying on market forces, nation states address and cope with the pressure point of skill upgrading in a strategic and political way. The management of international student mobility, among other national strategies aiming at a high skill society embraces a collective goal of national interest shaped by the political economy in each nation.

This dissertation comprises three essays. In the first two chapters, I examine the performance of Chinese firms in the context of trade liberalization: one chapter looks at the quality of China's exports and the other investigates the productivity impact of China's tariff reduction. In the third chapter, I study the change induced by a tax reform in the institutional incentive structure faced by Chinese village leaders.