The following material is a transcription of a discussion among the contributors to and organizers of the Round Table on the topic: Will a New Global Trade System or a Stronger Asian Free Trade Arrangement Emerge against the United States’ Aggressive Tariff Regime? A Political Economy Approach

Designed to meet the curriculum needs for students from grades 7 to 12, this five-volume encyclopedia explores world history from approximately 5000 C.E. to the present. Organized alphabetically within geographical volumes on Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and Asia and the Pacific, entries cover the social, political, scientific and technological, economic, and cultural events and developments that shaped the modern world.Each volume includes articles on history, government, and warfare the development of ideas and the growth of art and architecture religion and philosophy music science and technology and daily life in the civilizations covered. Boxed features include Turning Point, Great Lives, Into the Twenty-First Century, and Modern Weapons. Maps, timelines, and illustrations illuminate the text, and a glossary, a selected bibliography, and an index in each volume round out the set.

Based on a survey of 54 published articles, we undertake a meta-analysis of 906 estimates of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth. We conclude that the literature contains statistically significant evidence of a positive effect of financial liberalization on economic growth, and, in some cases, these effects can be considered as economically meaningful. Thus, some types of financial liberalization are effective policy tools for increasing an economy's rate of growth even if financial liberalization increases the volatility of the financial sector. We also identify the presence of publication-selection bias in the literature and, after adjusting for this bias, we conclude that stock market liberalization and comprehensive financial market liberalization are the most effective forms of financial sector liberalization for stimulating economic growth. There is conflicting evidence on whether other types of financial liberalization have similar effects.

During the First Industrial Revolution, industrialization led to incompatibilities between the economic sphere and a political sphere based on rule by monarchs and land-owning nobles. These incompatibilities led to poor economic outcomes for workers and, ultimately, to deep changes in the political system. In the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions, compatibility emerged between new technologies and political systems based on representative democracy, leading to favorable outcomes. The changes in technology brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution may lead to a growing incompatibility between the productive and political spheres, marked by polarization and conflict both within and among counties. A key aspect of this conflict is the rivalry between the United States and China. We evaluate the strengths of the respective countries and analyze which of them is likely to win the competition for dominance during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This paper examines the possibilities for, and obstacles to, the reunification of North and South Korea based on the experiences of the reunifications of Italy, the United States and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Common elements of these reunifications include a slow convergence of incomes and productivity of regions, important political barriers to the creation of a unified state and the need to neutralize as far as possible the power of the economic, political and social elites of the units being incorporated into the newly-created state. I find that these problems occur in all cases examined, and, based on these findings I offer policy recommendations for possible Korean unification.

We investigate whether investor-state arbitration under investment protection treaties is valuable to foreign investors, and whether international arbitration has effects on firm value that are like those seen in domestic litigation. An event study of abnormal returns when claims for arbitration are filed and adjudicated show that firms gain in market value both at the time they file for arbitration and when they receive an award. These gains in value generally exceed the size of the awards, indicating that success in arbitration provides the foreign investor not only monetary compensation but also non-monetary reputational effects that reduce costs of doing business abroad. Stock markets anticipate the outcomes of the arbitration process when claims are filed and when awards are announced. The effects on firm value of domestic litigation and investor-state arbitration differ, reflecting the institutional differences between the two methods of resolving disputes.

We undertake a meta-analysis of 1296 estimates of the effect of target-country legal environments on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs) compiled from 60 published studies. Although these studies provide effect estimates that are statistically significant, none of the legal variables considered, save civil law, has an effect on either CBMA intensity or the CBMA premium that is large enough to be meaningful. Thus, the studies fail to provide support for legal origins theory or for theories based on cultural distance as explanations for CBMA activity. Studies of the CBMA premium are plagued by inadequate statistical power, by unexplained inter-study differences in effect and by publication-selection bias. Based on our meta-analysis, we suggest reasons why the empirical evidence fails to support theories that have wide acceptance.

In this paper we examine resiliency, the ability to absorb and recover from economic shocks, in 199 Nuts-3 regions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) following the 2008 global financial crisis. We find evidence of strong positive regional spillovers, meaning that regions tend to form clusters of high-performing and lowperforming areas, a process that exacerbates regional income disparities. Using the experience of the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, we simulate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ability of these, and, by extension, other upper-middle-income countries to recover from a shock to employment caused by the incidence of COVID-19. Using our recoverability equation estimates, we find that employment in no more than 31 of the 199 regions will have fully recovered in 2 years after the onset of the recovery from the crisis. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.

We undertake a meta-analysis of the effects of international investment agreements for the protection of foreign investors on foreign direct investment using 2107 estimates drawn from 74 studies. Our meta-analysis finds robust evidence that effect of international investment agreements is so small as to be considered zero. However, our results do not rule out the possibility that the effect of these agreements is, in fact, positive and that current research methods are insufficiently powerful or precise to identify the underlying genuine effect. FDI from developed countries appears to be more responsive to the existence of investment protection, and there is evidence of publication-selection bias in favor of studies that find a positive effect for investor protection.

Using event study methodology, we investigate whether bilateral investment protection treaties afford protection to foreign investors. Examining arbitral decisions for firms from six countries shows that firms that received awards from arbitrators gained in market value by as much as 3%. Per dollar awarded, firms gained over $20 in market value. Thus, we conclude that the system of arbitration does afford significant benefits to firms that can demonstrate that they have been injured by host governments who violated the terms of the relevant investor protection treaty. We also find some evidence that arbitral decisions are anticipated by stock markets.

I examine the growth experience of the current BRICS countries in the light of the experience of earlier BRICS-like countries (France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan) as well as of the settler economies (Argentina, Australia, Canada, the US and South Africa) using the developmental framework of Alexander Gerschenkron. I also examine the political implications for the BRICS countries of their economic growth. The economic analysis shows the possibility of a middle-income trap at all points in history, due in part to the inability of countries to modify their development strategies or to adopt appropriate policies: continuing to foster the acquisition of labor and capital is critical for growth. In the political sphere, economic development changes the constellation of political forces in a country and the smooth adjustment to new political realities is a key factor in sustaining rapid growth. Within this analytical framework, China and India seem the BRICS countries best poised for continuing their development path. However, the BRICS are unlikely to initiate fundamental changes in the global economic order. [

We undertake a meta-analysis of the effects of international investment agreements for the protection of foreign investors on foreign direct investment using 2107 estimates drawn from 74 studies. Our meta-analysis finds robust evidence that effect of international investment agreements is so small as to be considered zero. However, our results do not rule out the possibility that the effect of these agreements is, in fact, positive and that current research methods are insufficiently powerful or precise to identify the underlying genuine effect. FDI from developed countries appears to be more responsive to the existence of investment protection, and there is evidence of publication-selection bias in favor of studies that find a positive effect for investor protection.

A good deal of the extant literature on corporate governance is based on a prioristic theorizing and tends to emphasize problems of collective action that prevent shareholders from monitoring managers and problems that emerge in the agent-principal relationship. Intercountry differences are greater in terms of paths to privatization than in the laws affecting corporate governance. A major difficulty in evaluating corporate-governance structures is that all models of corporate governance represent second-best solutions to the principal—agent problem. Glavunion is a large Czech manufacturer of flat glass whose majority owner is the Belgian glass-making firm Glaverbel. Fala, a Polish textile and clothing company, is an example of foreign investment with a solely financial majority shareholder who exercises governance power. Banks can remain holding the debt, while the assets go to a foreign investor, which could place a bank in the position of owning a share of the firm, enabling it to exercise a governance role.

•FDI from countries considered as corrupt or institutionally weak is growing in importance. Often these investments are directed toward countries that are similarly corrupt.•We construct a model of bilateral FDI stocks that explains why MNCs tend to invest greater amounts and more frequently in countries with similar levels of corruption and less in countries with different corruption levels.•Our model also predicts that corrupt countries will receive less foreign direct investment.•We test the model using bilateral FDI stocks between a large number of home and host countries. Differences in corruption levels do have statistically and economically significant effects on bilateral FDI, confirming our model.•Robustness tests verify that the results are robust to the inclusion of other commonly used covariates such as bilateral investment treaties, anti-bribery legislation, etc.

This article studies the impact of structural changes in China's banking sector on the financial constraints on Chinese listed companies' ability to finance their investments. Using information on the location of bank branches of all Chinese banks, we find that growing competition among banks reduces financing constraints on listed firms. We also show that the emergence of joint-stock commercial banks and regional commercial banks has played a major role in alleviating financing constraints on enterprises, partially due to the weakening of the monopolistic position of state-owned commercial banks. Our findings are based on an analysis of the investment behavior of Chinese listed companies over the period 2000-2015. The results lend support to policies that would further relax regulations on entry into the banking sector.

Agricultural policy in Czechoslovakia has aimed at three objectives. First, agriculture was to be socialized, with private production replaced by the collective farm or jednotne zemedelske druztvo (JZD), or by the state farm. Second, agriculture was to become more productive. Finally, planners have sought to eliminate regional differences in the productivity of agriculture. This process required the raising of productivity in the Slovak Socialist Republic to the level attained in the Czech Socialist Republic. The collectivization of agriculture in Czechoslovakia began in 1949 on the basis of the Unified Cooperatives Act of February 23. Once collectivization was completed, attention turned to increasing the productivity of agriculture. While the rationalization of both JZDs and state farms appears to be consistent with the goals of the planners to mechanize agriculture and to create an agro-industrial complex, the relative stability of the share of land, labor and other resources allocated to these two forms of organization is somewhat surprising.