The first two chapters study the effect of foreign lobbies on trade policy of a country which is a member of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). They rely on a monopolistically competitive political economy model in which the government determines external tariffs endogenously. In the first paper the effect of foreign lobbying under the FTA is examined empirically using Canadian industry-level trade data that allow differentiating of lobby groups by the country of origin. The analysis suggests that the presence of foreign lobbying has a significant effect on the domestic trade policy: the presence of an organized lobbying group in an FTA partner country tends to raise trade barriers while an organized lobbying group of exporters from outside of the FTA is associated with less protection. The second paper analyses political viability of FTAs and their effect on the world trading system in the presence of lobbying by organized foreign interest groups. I show that the FTA in the presence of an organized lobby group in a prospective partner country may cause an increase in the level of protection against imports from third countries and impede trade with non-member countries. I also find that foreign lobby may encourage the local government to enter a welfare-reducing trade-diverting FTA. Finally, I show that the FTA increases the lobbying power of the organized lobby groups of the member countries, which can potentially obstruct the viability of welfare-improving multilateral trade liberalization. The last paper shows that the reason for a higher capital-labor ratio observed for exporting firms is a higher capital intensity of their production technology. Exporters are more productive, more likely to survive and, hence, more likely to repay loans. A higher repayment probability causes creditors to charge lower interest rate and reduces the marginal cost of the firm when a more capital-intensive technology is used. Here, a reduction in international trade costs stimulates exporting firms to use more efficient capital-intensive technologies, while non-exporters switch to less capital-intensive ones. This within-industry change in the composition of technologies reinforces the productivity advantage of exporters and contributes further to industry-wide productivity improvement. The results of model simulations highlight that to 10% of welfare and productivity gains of trade liberalization come from the adoption of new technologies by existing firms in the industry, thus amplifying the effect of resource reallocation from firms' entry and exit. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

In this paper we present the major theoretical and methodological pillars of evolutionary political economy. We proceed in four steps. Aesthetics: In chapter 1 the immediate appeal of evolutionary political economy as a specific scientific activity is described. Content: Chapter 2 explores the object of investigation of evolutionary political economy. Power: The third chapter develops the interplay between politics and economics. Methods: Chapter 4 focuses on the evolution of methods necessary for evolutionary political economy.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent to which the BRICS can exert leadership in a world in which sustainability becomes ever more crucial, especially in light of the Sustainable Development Goals presently used to track progress and performance before 2030. Moreover, the focus on sustainability is deemed important to assess the ability of the BRICS to ‘sustain’ their own efforts at transforming global governance vis-à-vis internal and external social, political, economic and environmental fragilities. The study is based on a critical literature review and a host of secondary data of both qualitative and quantitative nature. The quantitative data, gathered from existing sources, assisted in the identification of trends and patterns within the respective BRICS countries regarding their overall sustainability. The qualitative has been used to draw deductions and conclusions regarding trends within the respective BRICS countries. The study concludes that the BRICS struggle in terms of sustainability. This is evident in the triad sustainability analysis of the bloc. The BRICS display varying degrees of weakness across all three spheres of sustainability. By contrast, there are other countries from the Global South that perform much better and could be seen as more credible leaders of a transition in global governance that is truly inspired by new values. These are: Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica and South Korea. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / Political Sciences / MA / Unrestricted

This research sought to examine how development occurs when it takes place from a relational approach. The relational approach forms part of a growing body of literature within development studies in search of alternative ways of understanding development. Orthodox theories tend to be resistant to alternatives that threaten their path dependency. Development-related ideological traps have also locked development policy in redundant arguments. Development theories from various disciplines continue to grapple with the multidimensionality of poverty and inequality, but they often fail to consider the central role human relationships play in approaching these issues. This study used Relational Thinking and relational and human economy approaches in search for alternative models and methods to the neoliberal tradition and current development enterprise. Increasing global inequality and deprivations create a vital opportunity to think of new perspectives, interpretive categories and predictive models. A case study approach was used to examine the relational dynamics of a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) called the James 1:27 Trust, which works with children and youth in Pretoria, South Africa. Relational Thinking was utilised within an interpretivist philosophy using a mixed-model approach, including the Relational Proximity Framework survey (quantitative tool) and in-depth qualitative research through semi-structured interviews and a focus group. The research established that development studied from a relational perspective deepens understanding of the varying meanings that people give to development. It informs a relational economy in which development is seen as a circular, “messy” and often unpredictable process where belonging, pain, “family”, forgiveness and learning in an intricate, embedded network of relationships are valued beyond material resources. Development requires philosophies and measures that enable the identification of questions, problems and interventions that are not currently considered in studies on development. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / DAAD-NRF In-Country Scholarship (German Academic Exchange Service and National Research Foundation). University of Pretoria’s Postgraduate Study Abroad Programme. / Political Sciences / PhD / Unrestricted

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying topics in development economics and political economy. The first two chapters explore the political economy of drought relief in India and potential consequences for local economies. The third chapter focuses on the effect of the residential segregation of the South Asian community on the political views of natives in England and Wales. In the first chapter, I study the allocation of drought relief in three states of southern India between 2008 and 2019. I compare the observed allocation against the national government’s guidelines for drought relief and show that state governments systematically deviate from these guidelines. To assess the potential role of political motives in this mistargeting, I develop a dynamic probabilistic voting model. The model provides testable implications relating electoral incentives to the allocation of relief, which I show hold empirically. In the second chapter, I consider the potential impacts of receiving drought relief on agricultural output at the local level. Using a satellite-based vegetation index as a proxy for agricultural production, I find that drought relief is associated with increased agricultural output. However, I also show that this positive correlation is strongest when relief is appropriately allocated to drought-affected areas. I consider a number of alternative explanations for these results, but conclude that the results are consistent with drought relief being more effective in drought-affected areas. In the third chapter (joint with Sergio Villar Vallenas), we study how the size and spatial distribution of South Asians influences the sentiments of natives towards the group in England and Wales. We use voting for the British National Party (BNP), an extreme right political party, to measure natives’ sentiment. One obstacle to causally identifying the effect of segregation on the voting for the BNP is that the antipathy for South Asians reflected in BNP support might lead to segregation. To address this concern, we isolate variation in the settlement patterns of South Asians using historical immigration patterns. We find that a rise in the residential segregation of South Asians increases voting for the BNP in both a European Parliament and UK general election.

The first chapter analyzes the impact of gender quota regulation on women's participation in politics. Gender quotas are the main policy tools used to encourage participation in politics. A natural experiment in Spanish municipal elections is exploited to study the success of such reforms. Gender quotas are found to improve the number of women candidates, but due to strategic reaction from political parties, much fewer women are being elected. Political parties disproportionately allocate women to the lowest possible position while still complying with the law. Parties have a propensity to assign women candidates to positions where they have relatively low chance of being elected. There is also no shift in public policy toward spending preferred by women. The second chapter presents empirical evidence in support of the Leviathan model of government. In Spain, the number of politicians chosen in local elections depends on the population of the municipality. Using a data set that covers over two decades of municipal elections, I present two main results. First, there is an unusual concentration of municipalities (bunching) with reported populations just above the threshold that increases the number of local representatives. I present compelling evidence that elected officials manipulate population figures in advance of upcoming elections in order to maximize the size of the council. Second, I use machine learning techniques to construct an unbiased measure of population based on luminosity data and census population figures, and study which municipalities are more likely to misreport based on the quality of the democratic institutions. Based on those measures, I conclude that misreporting is more likely to happen in municipalities with higher turnout and less parties in their council. The final chapter studies the impact that World War II fatalities had on political preferences during the twentieth century in the United States. We document enlistment and fatalities at the county level and use this variation to study the hypothesis that fatalities permanently shifted U.S. political preferences. In particular, we test whether the proximate casualties theory, which states that voters punish incumbents in the short run after a war, affected United States counties after World War II. We conclude that there is not enough evidence in our analysis to determine that fatalities during World War II significantly impacted long term political preferences.

Thesis advisor: Mehmet Ekmekci / This dissertation consists of three essays on media, political and learning. More specifically, I investigate the effects of biased media and learning from that biased media on political institutions. In the first essay, titled “Optimal Dynamic Information Supply and Competition”, I provide a model of an information market where the viewers acquire signals each period at an attention cost, solving an optimal stopping problem à la Wald (1947), and the objective of the potentially biased information providers is to maximize the number of viewers who acquire signals from them across periods. I find that, in a monopoly market, the information provider sends unbiased signals that perfectly reveal the state of the world when there is a single period but provides biased signals when there are multiple periods. This is because biased signals elongate the learning process of some viewers, potentially increasing the information provider payoff. I also find that incentives due to competition, modeled as another information provider that is potentially biased in the opposite direction, overtake the intertemporal incentives and the full information equilibrium is recovered, even though it is wasteful in terms of social welfare. Hence, the paper provides a model with rational information providers and viewers that leads to biased signals in equilibrium. In the second essay, titled “Voter Behavior and Information Aggregation in Elections with Supermajority”, I provide a model of elections where there are three possible outcomes, but the voters can directly vote for one of the two options. Theoutcome of the election corresponds to the options if the vote share for one of them is higher than a supermajority threshold. If neither of the options achieves that, then the result is the third outcome that the voters cannot explicitly vote for, which I interpret as compromise. I investigate various properties of elections in this setting. I find that, in line with the popular argument, supermajority rules foster compromise outcomes. But, on the other hand, elections with supermajority rules fail to aggregate information. In the third essay, titled “Protests, Strategic Information Provision and Political Communication”, I consider a model of protests where the protesters learn about the state of the world via a biased information provider whose objective is to either instigate or dissuade the protest. A successful protest removes the incumbent from office, where the success threshold is determined by the incumbent who is biased. My main aim is to uncover whether the incumbent can learn the true state of the world from the protest turnout, even though the information of the citizens is provided by biased media. I pin down the optimal success threshold and signal noise choices by the incumbent and the information provider, respectively. I find that if the information provider is trying to instigate the protest, then political communication is always possible, regardless of the level of the bias of the incumbent. If the information provider is trying to dissuade the protest, then political communication is possible if and only if the incumbent bias is relatively small. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

<p> This research project is based on the increasing importance states like Canada and Singapore give to their gateway initiatives, marketing cities like Singapore and Vancouver, as bridges between the East - mainly understood as the People's Republic of China - and the West. I am interested in the everyday life changes developing in Singapore and Vancouver as a result of these gateway initiatives in the business and education sectors, notably when it comes to catering to international students and young professionals.</p> <p> In trying to understand how gateways between East and West are experienced in everyday life, I argue that these initiatives take meaning through the everyday actions of individuals and community associations embodying these gateways. More specifically, I am interested in the actions of what I call gatekeepers: Chinese community associations well established in Singapore and Vancouver that have to adapt, influence and appropriate these gateway initiatives.</p> <p> It is my contention that both gateway projects in Singapore and Vancouver, Canada are based on neo-liberal assumptions with respect to profiting economically from a specific international context in which the economic rise of China is marketed to the West. The stories of community associations and individuals are giving to these projects specific nuances and goals that reflect both broader trends in the international political economy, such as the use of international education to migrate to Western countries, and smaller perspectives, such as transnational survival strategies of families. </p> <p> In this dissertation, I examine more thoroughly the structural limitations neo-liberal assumptions of these gateway projects create on: who is seen as a desirable migrant for/at the gateway, how community associations ought to adapt to stay relevant within these gateways and how exclusions are created along identity lines and privilege assumed within a neo-liberal framework.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> This research paper studies the urban phenomena of cooperative housing in Canada. A political economy approach is used in this documentation of the delivery of the Women's Community Cooperative in Hamilton, Ontario. The focus of this paper is upon the individual members of the Innovative Housing Group, and how their collective actions enabled them to deliver this unique housing service. Individual members of the delivery group were studied to determine how political circumstances influenced their decision to create the Innovative Housing Group. They were also studied to determine what characteristics of their collective group enabled them to deliver the cooperative. Present day members of the cooperative were studied to determine how they view cooperative living and to see if involvement and participation was occurring within the cooperative organization. This study is relevant to urban geography as it shows how individuals may take control over their environment and with collective action overcome strong political, social, and economic forces to produce alternative housing types such as cooperatives.</p> / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

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