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Japan has emerged in recent years as a leading donor country with African countries. At one level, Japan’s renewed assertiveness in providing foreign aid to Africa is on par with the more active approach by other donor countries. It might appear to some that Japan’s motivations to lend capital and technical assistance to African countries are shared by all lending countries. However, I argue that Japan’s Official Development Policy seeks to break away from the Washington Consensus and to demonstrate its particular leadership position in the donor community. Rather than to focus on domestic bureaucratic politics to explain Japanese ODA or on the specific targets of foreign aid, this chapter seeks to identify the basic features of Japanese national identity that explain its aid policy to Africa. Three themes of Japan’s national economic identity will be highlighted. First, an underlying theme in Japanese foreign aid is its history towards economic development both within Japan and towards Asia. Second, one of the more important aspects underlining Japan’s ODA policy is its relationship to the “Asian economic model.” The main characteristics of Japan’s ODA facilitate self-help and partnership through industrialization, production, and trade. Third, Japan has promoted its own ODA model as distinct from other donors. Japan is the only non-Western country with a history of successful industrialization and Japanese officials have at times distanced themselves from the dominant policy prescriptions embedded in the Washington Consensus. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores local European communities' efforts to respond to the challenges posed by the global economy. Significantly, the European Union (EU) has implemented a policy, known as the regional cohesion Objective Two Structural Funds, targeting communities that have experienced economic shocks such as deindustrialization. The EU's commitment to such a significant policy directed at sub-national governing units reflects a theoretical shift in political science and economic geography that is often referred to as the "new regionalism."This study adopts a research strategy that has been successfully applied in studying local economic development policy in the United States, the "Gateway Community Project" (http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Political%5FScience/gateways/). Interviews with local regional and national elected and non-elected administrators in Italy and Luxembourg examining the following questions were accomplished in March and April, 2006: What role do intergovernmental accords, including bilateral and multilateral international treaties as well as local and national power-sharing, play in formulating and implementing local economic development policies? Are communities that have undertaken international solutions to local economic challenges better able to cope with changes to their local economies? To what extent are local public-private partnerships utilized in finding solutions to local economic challenges?Preliminary findings indicate that local economic development strategies still largely remain under national control. On the other hand, communities that have undertaken European programs have benefited from increases in human-capital among local administrative staff. Finally, despite efforts to promote public-private partnerships at the local level, these agreements have been limited by the lack of necessary legislation at the national level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between globalization and welfare policies? Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has investigated the links between an open economy and government spending. In the 1980s, the dominant view of the fate of social spending in an increasingly globalized economy was rather pessimistic. The "race to the bottom" hypothesis predicted that economic openness would pressure governments to cut public spending overall and, particularly, social spending. Contrary to this prediction, a number of studies of OECD countries have shown that economic openness encourages social spending. Increasing electoral pressures for compensation from the losers of globalization, the strength of left parties, labor unions and new welfare state constituencies (such as the retired), and the stickiness of welfare state institutions have all been proposed as explanations for why welfare states kept expanding or did not retrench in the face of pressures from globalization and deindustrialization (Esping-Andersen 1990, Korpi and Palme 2003, Pierson 1994,1996, Stephens, Huber and Ray 1999). To what extent are the arguments and findings of this research on the welfare state in developed countries applicable to the rest of the world? Our paper explores the effects of globalization on social spending in less developed countries. More specifically, we examine social policies in Turkey, Mexico and Poland. By breaking down social spending into its different components (education, health care, social security), we trace changes in various domestic groups' preferences on welfare spending, as well as their relative power and influence on policy processes in these three countries. These countries all underwent economic liberalization during the 1980s, but their social spending trajectories have varied both over time and from one another. An analysis of this variation allows us to explore the effects of increasing liberalization on different types of social spending. Few studies that have looked at the fate of social policies beyond the industrialized countries have found that economic openness has had a negative effect on social spending in developing countries (Rudra 2002, Wibbels and Arce 2003). Our paper contributes to this body of research by a rigorous analysis of a small number of cases, which allows us to explore the processes of welfare state transformation. Furthermore, we highlight whether and how the concepts, methods and arguments derived from the study of welfare state in industrialized countries can be applicable to less developed countries.References:Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Korpi, Walter and Joakim Palme. 2003. "New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries, 1975-95," American Political Science Review 97(3): 425-445.Pierson, Paul. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? : Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pierson, Paul. 1996b. "The New Politics of the Welfare State," World Politics 48: 143-79.Rudra, Nita. 2002. "Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in Less-Developed Countries." International Organization. 56: 411-45. Stephens, John, Evelyn Huber, and Leonard Ray. 1999 "The Welfare State in Hard Times,"In Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, eds. Peter Lange, Herbert Kitschelt, Gary Marks and John Stephens. Cambridge University Press.Wibbels, Erik and Moises Arce. 2003. "Globalization, Taxation, and Burden-Shifting in Latin America." International Organization 57: 111-36. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]