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The number of fortified borders around the world has risen precipitously. This surge in walls is an important part of the larger globalization "backlash," as countries react to the unwanted consequences of economic openness and globalization, with a rise in illicit trade and smuggling being a prominent example. Despite the prominence of the idea that walls are built to combat illicit flows, no research systematically explores how walls generally affect illicit trade. This is a notable omission for at least two reasons. First, the most prominent explanations for wall construction put combating illicit trade front and center. Second, recent work that finds walls significantly reduce legal trade argues that this finding derives from border fortifications diverting illegal trade to ports of entry, which leads to more inspection, security, and transaction costs. We develop a new measure of illicit trade flows using over five decades of product-level data and provide a battery of evidence that shows border barriers increase illicit flows at ports of entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I suggest that economic globalization is experiencing a particularly serious kind of crisis: a "polycrisis." Use of this term has proliferated recently but with many meanings. I propose that it be defined as a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other. This core definition enables the identification of distinct types of polycrises that capture multiple uses of the term to date. These types vary according to the spatiality, temporality, and level of generality of each polycrisis as well as the traits of its constituent crises. The analytical utility of the term, when defined in this way, is to encourage scholars to analyze interconnections between different kinds of crises across various issue areas and to reject monocausal analyses of crisis clusters they study. Applying this understanding of the concept to the study of economic globalization, I focus on five constituent crises that are contributing to its current polycrisis. This application of the term highlights yet another type of polycrisis, illustrating the importance of the conceptual issues raised above. The article concludes with some cautions about efforts to predict economic globalization's future and about ways in which polycrisis discourse may serve political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That economic integration constrains state sovereignty has been a longstanding concern and the subject of much study. We assess the validity of this concern in the context of two very particular components of contemporary economic globalization: global value chain (GVC) integration and Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). First, we document that host states have abandoned nearly 24 percent of regulations disputed by private investors in ISDS between 1987 and 2017. This behavior is puzzling because ISDS only requires host states to provide monetary compensation to investor-claimants and not the abandonment of disputed regulations. We theorize that host states are more likely to abandon a disputed regulation when the claimant has a greater potential to disrupt GVCs in the host economy. We then employ the non-parametric difference-in-differences estimator by Imai, Kim, and Wang (2021) and find that ISDS filings cause substantial decreases in GVC trade. Following this result, we provide descriptive statistics and qualitative evidence that support our core theoretical proposition that multinational corporations (MNCs) with the potential to disrupt GVC integration are more likely to see host states changing regulations in their favor. Our argument and evidence suggest that GVC integration can grow an MNC's power to such an extent that the host state abandons a regulation that the MNC disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that international trade increases military enlistment in the United States. Trade-related job losses reduce economic opportunities in local labor markets, and the government responds by increasing military recruitment efforts in those counties. This dynamic challenges conventional accounts of globalization, which tend to overlook the local impact of free trade and only examine the traditional welfare policies that governments offer to compensate "trade losers." This study analyzes an original, county-level data set on army enlistment and trade-related job losses from 1996 to 2010. The results suggest that a trade shock of one thousand job losses is associated with a 33 percent increase in army enlistment in the median county. To illustrate the causal mechanisms that link free trade to army enlistment, this study also presents a case study based on original interviews in Catawba County, North Carolina, a county particularly impacted by trade liberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous incentives to attract investment. Existing economics research has suggested that these tax incentives have a limited ability to affect investment patterns and are often excessively costly when measured against the amount of investment and jobs created. In this paper, we argue instead that the 'competition' for capital can be politically beneficial to incumbent politicians. Building off work on electoral pandering, we argue that incentives allow politicians to take credit for firms' investment decisions. We test the empirical implications of this theory using a nationwide Internet survey, which employs a randomized experiment to test how voters evaluate the performance of incumbent US governors. Our findings illustrate a critical political benefit of offering such incentives. Politicians can use these incentives to take credit for investment flowing into their districts and to minimize the political fallout when investors choose to locate elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between respect for labor rights and foreign direct investment ( FDI)? This study explores this connection with an emphasis on the strategic role of governments in attracting FDI. We present a formal model demonstrating that governments can do so by setting the level of labor rights protection and, as a consequence, investors will choose to invest in the face of tough labor regulations or cease investing, anticipating that the costs of abiding by these regulations will be too high. The model also suggests that governments will have an incentive to implement labor regulations when enforcement costs are sufficiently low or the profits from investment are sufficiently high. Using data from developing countries across time, error correction models test the dynamic nature of these hypotheses and find support for them: strict labor laws tend to decrease inflow of FDI, but more FDI tends to encourage better labor practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the adjustment of wage bargaining institutions to international trade in Germany. Embracing IPE as opposed to CPE lenses yields a novel interpretation of change in the institution of wage bargaining. Export dependence of a sector, we argue, has destabilizing effects for industry-wide bargaining by sparking an intra-sectoral cleavage between domestic- and export-oriented enterprises. Specifically, the greater the degree of export dependence of a sector, the greater the degree to which domestic-oriented enterprises within that sector will abandon collective bargaining. We also explain how workplace employee representation through works councils mitigates this effect, such that the presence of works councils helps domestically oriented firms to hold to collective bargaining agreements in the face of a sector's deepening exposure to export markets. These claims find empirical support in the history of labor relations developments in the metal industry and, especially, in extensive analysis of a cross-section of establishments. Our findings attribute major responsibility to the firms driving globalization for undermining collective bargaining institutions and suggest that economic globalization is a cause of dualization. In all, the article provides fresh ammunition for a version of globalization-induced institutional convergence. [Correction added after online publication on May 28, 2014: 'conversion' changed to 'convergence' in preceding sentence.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between economic globalization, factor mobility, government partisanship, and the relative budgetary salience of two different instruments of compensation policies: social welfare spending and industrial subsidy provision. While welfare spending directly benefits labor, industrial subsidies benefit both capital owners and labor along the sectoral line. Based on both factoral and sectoral models of trade, we theoretically argue and empirically show that governments are more likely to use welfare politics as compensation policies if free trade generates class-based interests in the society, and subsidy politics if trade openness promotes industry-based interests. We also argue that the interactions of the three variables are contingent on government partisanship. When non-class-based interests are salient as a consequence of trade openness, left-wing governments are likely to focus on welfare politics while right-wing governments favor provision of subsidies. However, when class-based interests are salient, even right-wing governments behave similarly to left-wing governments, favoring welfare spending over subsidies as the key compensation policy. In the analysis of compensation policies in the OECD countries between 1980 and 2001, the test results confirm our expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates whether globalization can improve women's rights. Using panel data from 150 countries over the 1981-2008 period, I find that social globalization positively affects women's economic and social rights. When controlling for social globalization, however, economic globalization does not have any effect on women's rights. Despite the positive effect of (social) globalization on women's standing in a country, (marginalized) foreign women, proxied with inflows of human trafficking, are not beneficiaries of such 'female-friendly' globalization effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a fundamental failing in the debate on the decline of American economic power is not taking globalization seriously. With the rise of transnational corporations ( TNCs), transnational modular production networks, and the globalization of corporate ownership, we can no longer give the same relevance to national accounts such as balance of trade and GDP in the twenty-first century as we did in the mid-twentieth. Rather, we must summon data on the TNCs themselves to encompass their transnational operations. This will reveal, for example, that despite the declining global share of United States GDP from 40% in 1960 to below a quarter from 2008 onward, American corporations continue to dominate sector after sector. In fact, in certain advanced sectors such as aerospace and software-even in financial services-American dominance has increased since 2008. There are no serious contenders, including China. By looking at the wrong data, many have failed to see that American economic power has not declined-it has globalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who do citizens blame for the recent European economic crisis? In this paper, we test theories about blame attribution with respect to the economic crisis. We argue that blame for the crisis is partially conditioned by partisan bias and framings of the crisis as being related to globalization. We test the argument with new survey data and a survey experiment from Spain. In the experiment, respondents receive different framings of the economic crisis which are endorsed by different political parties and non-partisan organizations. We obtain the following findings: (i) blame for who is responsible for the economic crisis is greatly affected by partisanship; (ii) making globalization as a cause of the crisis salient exonerates the government of blame, but only for co-partisans of the government; and (iii) citizens are willing to blame other globalization-related factors for the crisis, in particular, European governments and blame the domestic government less. The results expand our understanding of public opinion dynamics during major economic recessions and also suggest conditions under which 'scapegoating' globalization can occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers typically assume that economic openness increases volatility. But the conventional empirical shorthand for economic openness (trade as a share of overall income) fails to account for crucial distinctions in the way that states trade. States that are deeply incorporated into the core of the international trading network have very different experiences than states at the periphery with fewer, more marginalized trading partners. This article demonstrates that a position at the core of the international trading system rather than the periphery actually diminishes volatility. Thus, a country's position in the world economy can, independently of its overall volume of trade, moderate the risks of exposure to international markets. To demonstrate how this distinction might impact political outcomes and future scholarship, we show that this reduction in volatility allows governments to minimize compensation to their domestic publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely accepted that the classic arguments regarding the "structural power" of business are too "structuralist." Subsequent research has focused on a widening array of independent variables that shape the variability of such power. This paper extends this research tradition, arguing that structural power theory has given insufficient attention to governmental actors, typically the targets of such power. The paper argues that ideas and the ideational processes through which government and state leaders construct threat perceptions regarding structural power can be important in mediating such power. The literature on power typically argues that power shapes ideas and disciplines target subjects. This paper revises this logic by arguing that the ideas of target subjects can also shape power. The paper's arguments then are essentially constructivist, but the paper extends such arguments by insisting on a greater role for agency than is often found in constructivist reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on how globalization affects the welfare state has so far largely neglected to examine the microlevel causal mechanism underlying different macrolevel claims. Based on survey data from Switzerland, this article provides empirical microfoundations for the so-called compensation hypothesis. It finds that globalization losers are more likely to express feelings of economic insecurity. Such feelings, in turn, increase preferences for welfare state expansion, which in turn increase the likelihood of voting for the Social Democratic Party. The analysis also shows that globalization losers and winners differ significantly with regard to their social policy preferences and their propensity to vote for left parties. The article is innovative on two counts: First, it uses a number of different and more nuanced indicators measuring individuals’ positions as beneficiaries or losers of increasing global competition. Second, rather than focusing on one particular part of the causal chain, it tests the entire individual-level causal mechanism implied by the compensation hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors account for labor strategies in global industries? While some scholars point to economic factors and others look to political opportunity structures, an examination of union actions in the Central American apparel export industry over a 14-year period suggests that activists’ historical experiences and ideological orientations also strongly influence union dynamics. Left-oriented unions tend to form unions through transnational activism whereas conservative unions most often turn to plant-level cross-class collaboration. Moreover, these two union strategies are interconnected. Successful transnational activism facilitates conservative union formation through a “radical flank” mechanism; the threat of left-union organizing motivates employers to accept unionization by conservative unions to block left unions from gaining influence in the plant. To examine these arguments, this article employs pooled time-series statistical analysis, structured interviews with labor organizers, and process tracing that draws on nine months of field research in Honduras and El Salvador. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]