Research focusing on the political economy of Mississippian mound centers in the middle Savannah River valley has prompted a reevaluation of current interpretations regarding societal complexity. I conclude the clearest expression of classic Mississippian riverine-adaptation is evident at centers immediately below the Fall Line with their political ties to chiefdom centers in the Piedmont, and especially Etowah. By contrast, those centers on the interior Coastal Plain were politically autonomous with minimal signatures in social ranking. The scale of appropriated labor and resulting level of surplus production, necessitated by upland settlement on the Aiken Plateau, fostered social contradictions making communally-oriented and decentralized societies more sustainable than hierarchical forms.

This thesis analyses the political economy of the decision of Italy and Germany to participate in the euro. The emphasis is on understanding the economic rationales employed in each country in support of euro membership. For Italy, the central argument is that Italy outsourced monetary policy management to the ECB in order to delimit deficient domestic policy making and import German monetary credibility. This transferred the costs of monetary orthodoxy to Europe, and the thesis briefly examines places where we might observe those costs. For Germany, the argument is that, out of respect for the national humiliation and shame of the Second World War, Germany shirked the possibility of unilaterally leading European monetary policy in favour of a European solution that suited German economic interests. German actors were aware of these economic benefits at the time.

This thesis contributes to the public finance literature concerned with fiscal sustainability, and consists of an introduction and four stand-alone essays. The first three essays analyse the reasons why governments accumulate large levels of debt. In the first essay, I find that parties that implement fiscal consolidations are punished by the voters in the following election. However, there does not appear to be a rewarding effect for governments that implement fiscal expansions. The second essay, which is co-authored with Rafael Ahlskog, shows how voter opposition to fiscal consolidation is shaped by moral considerations and feelings of personal responsibility. More precisely, we argue that voters are more likely to refuse fiscal consolidation when they do not feel responsible for the public debt. The third essay argues that misperceptions about the business cycle would have caused fiscal problems even if policy-making was conducted by independent experts. According to my estimates, biased projections have weakened annual budget balances by approximately one per cent of GDP. In the fourth essay, I argue that budgetary mechanisms created to improve fiscal discipline have a bias toward a reduced public sector. Because discretionary decisions are usually required to adjust public expenditures to price and wage increases, periods of rapid growth have repeatedly caused the welfare state to shrink. I use the introduction to discuss the commonalities between the essays and to situate the field of public finance in a broader, historical context.

In the context of increasing nursing labor shortages around the world, the Philippines has become a major producer and exporter of nurses, with 85 percent of employed Filipino nurses working outside of the Philippines. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in a provincial center for nursing education and healthcare in Northern Luzon, Philippines, I utilize a global nurse care chain (Yeates 2004a, 2009a) framework to explore transnational nurse migration out of the Philippines through the experiences of nurses, nursing students, their families and other stakeholders in nurse production and migration. As a more local GNCC analysis, the present study traces the production and provision of nursing care labor through the family and local and transnational household, to formal training and nursing experiences in educational and health institutions, and through other encounters with state, private, and international agencies that facilitate and shape the experiences and subjectivities of migrant nurses. Chapter 2 traces the relationship between the production and migration industries and between these industries and the state, exploring the ways that both the healthcare landscape and experiences of new nursing graduates (as consumers and laborers) has been shaped by migration booms and busts. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the household as a site of nurse production and the role of the household's moral economy and structures of feeling (Williams 1977). In Chapter 3, I examine nursing students' narratives of choice in the decision to study nursing and argue that obligation to family and reciprocal financial and emotional relationships underlie nurse production. In Chapter 4, I explore the ways that nurses and students imagine their future lives and identities as migrant nurses, illustrating how subjectivities are shaped by a legacy of transnational migration, imagination, and family moral economy. In Chapter 5, I use the narrative of a returned migrant nurse to illustrate the long-term impacts of past and temporary migration, and the ways that returned migrants may construct their identities through remembering. The final chapter explores the nurse migration industry through recruitment agents and nurses navigating this privatized industry as they pursue migration opportunities. Beyond an ethnography of nursing students', nurses' and their families' experiences of nurse training and migration processes, this dissertation focuses the roles of the state, private industry, and family in the mobilization of gendered and filial subjectivities to stimulate nurse production and migration, and explores the complex effects of unregulated nurse migration industries on students, nurses, and families as consumers and laborers.

The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the reciprocal direct relationship between political regimes, political instability and economic growth. However, there is a lack of fit between the political and economic science especially when it comes to political determinants of economic growth. Thus, this thesis sheds further light on the question: To what extent do political regimes and their stability affects economic performance with reference to 20 Western European countries. A panel regression analysis is employed, by adopting multiple measures of government performance. The findings suggest that political regimes have an effect on economic growth and this effect is not directly dependent upon the broader governmental structure and political environment. This thesis further examines the puzzle of the nature between political instability and economic growth in Western Europe, by using both a more comprehensive measure of political instability than has previously been developed, and Greek growth cycles form 1919 to 2008 as a case to explore the nature of the researched issue. The findings propose that the relationship between political instability (PI) and economic growth is parabolic and fragile. Furthermore, this thesis supports the intuition that political instability can slow economic growth through increasing uncertainty in economic policies. The results illustrate that economic growth and political instability are jointly determined and that governmental changes plays no significant role on economic growth (with exceptions in the case study), especially after extended spells of political stability. It appears that what matters is the longevity of the polity itself and the specific forms of political instability. Moreover, by using Greece as a case, this thesis shows that there is a strong negative link between political instability and the volatility of the economic outcomes.

The growing global presence of China’s state-owned enterprise (SOEs) has captured much of the world’s attention. Continuous waves of SOEs’ overseas ventures, a result of government-led transnationalization officially dubbed the “Going Out” strategy, have generated great uneasiness in international relations. This dissertation, The Politics of China’s “Going Out” Strategy: Overseas Expansion of Central State-owned Enterprises, seeks to answer the following question: how the Chinese central state and central SOEs interact with one another as the “Going Out” strategy has evolved. This dissertation finds that the transnationalization of SOEs is by no means a coherent policy but rather is fraught with power struggle, with various bureaucratic agencies setting different goals for SOEs on the one hand and with SOEs managers defending corporate interests without incurring political setbacks on the other. The state’s advocacy of the overseas expansion of SOEs was aimed at achieving national economic and security goals, but SOEs, with their expanded autonomy gained from the new state-market relationship, have been able to ignore state directives that were detrimental to firms’ financial performance. This dissertation also finds that negotiation and bargaining between China’s fragmented bureaucracy and SOE managers over the terms of firms’ “going out” grow more intense as corporate autonomy become increasingly institutionalized with the progress of reform. Over time, SOEs’ overseas expansion reflected more the firms’ corporate strategy than the state’s policy objectives. / text

This ethnographic research examines the social service encounter between private providers and child recipients involved in a faith-based afterschool program located in a southern US city. I specifically focus on the tensions and divisions that developed between staff members and participating families in daily programmatic interactions and rhetoric. I highlight how race, class, and gender intersected with age to shape children’s different experiences of the afterschool program and their lives beyond the agency. I also show how these social categories converged in local stories of religious poverty relief, which build upon cultural narratives about American welfare, to blind staff to the realities of children’s lives. These issues resulted in a program where staff members sought to transform children away from imagined social ills they associated with guardians to ideologically and programmatically isolate children from their families. I explore these conditions to draw attention to some of the ways structural inequalities can be reproduced and maintained in private service provision. It is in this context that I examine the increasing prominence of faith-based organizations within domestic poverty policy and relief services.

<p>This thesis consists of three essays in the fields of the political economy of international trade.</p><p><i>Location Equilibrium with Endogenous Rent Seeking:</i></p><p>This paper analyzes the location of manufacturing activities when regional policy is determined by endogenous rent seeking. Once lobbying for government transfers to regions is included in an economic geography framework with size asymmetries, the standard prediction that the larger region becomes the core when trade barriers are reduced no longer holds. The establishment of manufacturing production in the economically smaller region is increasing in the level of regional integration once trade becomes freer than a certain threshold value. When free trade prevails, the relocation of industry takes place up to the point where there are as many firms operating in the South as in the North. Furthermore, lobbying slows down the agglomeration process, whereas the home market magnification effect (Baldwin, 2000) becomes weaker.</p><p><i>Endogenous Tariff Formation and the Political Economy of Trade Retaliation:</i></p><p>This paper extends the notion of endogenous tariff formation under representative democracy by allowing for strategic interaction between governments. The model developed suggests that the ideological distribution in the electorate within a country affects the tariff setting behavior among its trading partners. The equilibrium tariffs in a country depend on the trade policy preferences of the ideologically neutral voters among such partners as well as on the distribution of their sector-specific factor ownership. Ideological shifts in the population which systematically alter the political power of different voter groups, or types of factor owners, in one country thus influence the tariff setting behavior in competing trading nations.</p><p><i>On the Indeterminacy of Trade Policy under Different Electoral Rules:</i></p><p>Current research has found ambiguous results with respect to the effects of the type of electoral regime on trade policy. The present paper proposes a solution to this indeterminacy. It is shown that the equilibrium level of trade protection can be relatively higher, as well as lower, under a majoritarian electoral rule compared to proportional representation. The framework developed in this paper thus includes as special cases earlier models reported in the literature. The equilibrium outcome is shown to depend on the number of voters in swing districts who own a factor specific to the exporting industry in relation to those who possess claims to the specific input employed by the import-competing sector. Using a cross section of countries, empirical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis.</p>

This paper compares the effect of political institutions on economic development in Brazil and Mexico. Between the 1950s and 1970s, both countries experienced unprecedented growth rates of between five and seven percent annually. By the 1980s, however, their economies slowed dramatically, and their development futures, which had previously looked prosperous, appeared grim. The sudden transition from success to failure indicates that certain underlying problems existed during the nations’ miracle growth years. This paper seeks to determine and examine these problems, and analyze how both Mexico and Brazil have worked to remedy these underlying inefficiencies. The analysis begins with an overview of the Solow model, which is the fundamental economic standard used in this paper. According to this model, economic growth occurs through certain exogenous variables, such as total factor productivity, the quality of the labor force, and the investment rate. The paper considers the details of the relationship between economic growth and political systems, particularly focusing on the structure of political institutions and the decisions of policymakers. Both Mexico and Brazil are then analyzed separately through the lens of the Solow model, concentrating especially on how each respective government failed to maximize efficiency, the quality and quantity of the workforce, as well as investment rates. While both Mexico and Brazil mirrored each other in terms of their economic growth throughout the twentieth century, Brazil is now poised to enjoy greater future development success than Mexico due to the decisions and commitment level of its government.

The voting system a government chooses has influence upon the way people vote, as it has some bearing on the average person’s utility received from voting. In the United States the Electoral College system is used to determine who becomes president-elect, but theoretical arguments have been made to support a change in voting structure to Proportional Representation. I developed my model to understand more about how a change in the voting structure would affect voter utility. My contribution to the research question focuses upon relative benefits of one voter in a specific party to another voter in another party. I used an empirical approach, using data pulled from past elections and survey data. My model suggests that Republican voters would receive a higher utility from a change in the voting system from the Electoral College to Proportional Representation. It is unclear whether Democrats would receive a higher benefit, but at least would receive a lesser utility change than that of the Republican voters.