The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance-the quality of public administration-to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problematic, suffering from perceptual biases, adverse selection in sampling, and conceptual conflation with economic policy choices. Within the limits of somewhat problematic measures, the evidence suggests that there is far more reason to believe that growth and development spur improvements in governance than vice versa. The policy implications are profound, for international organizations and governments are beginning to condition developmental aid on problematic measures of administrative performance.
Examining the role of labour inspection in the context of the revival of labour market regulation, the authors distinguish between the Latin model, where inspectors have authority to tailor enforcement to firms' exigencies, and the less flexible United States approach. The Latin model can reconcile regulation with economic flexibility and transform inspectors into the shock troops of a campaign for decent work. But its vulnerability to arbitrary behaviour on their part needs to be addressed through: management of organizational cultures; exposure and systematization of the tacit knowledge underpinning inspectors' judgements; and research into the relationship between labour standards and business practices. regulatory renaissance is under way in southern Europe, North Africa A and Latin America. This renaissance is marked by the demise of the alleged Washington Consensus and the resuscitation of the age-old debate over the relative costs and benefits of labour market regulation. Though policymakers in countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Morocco and Spain have devoted new resources and personnel to the enforcement of their labour and employment laws, thereby redoubling their commitment to the cause of worker protection, they have for the most part ignored two plausible -though far from incontrovertible -objections to their efforts. These are, first, that the regulations in question are likely to impede adjustment, job creation and growth; and, second, that the inspectors responsible for enforcing the regulations are at best incompetent and at worst corrupt. We draw a distinction between the first objection, which we label the "economic" critique of regulation, and the second, which we label the "political" critique of regulation. We also point out that the political critique reinforces the economic one, since regulations that might redound to the benefit of workers in theory will almost certainly redound to the detriment of workers and their employers in practice -that is, when enforced by incompetent or corrupt public officials.
The commodity-chain approach to economic development has inspired a growing literature on the apparel trade. While advocates of the approach hold that North American apparel firms are transferring skill and technology to Mexico and are thereby encouraging "export upgrading" south of the border, I illuminate a parallel process of skill and technology transfer in the Caribbean Basin and thereby (1) underscore the generality of the commodity-chain approach to supply-chain integration and (2) call the benefits ofintegration into question. I maintain that the returns to skill and technology transfer are inversely related to the extent ofskill and technology transfer and explore the inherent tension between the generality of the commodity-chain approach and the accuracy of its predictions.
The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual “property” and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of software “piracy” to assess the mechanisms by which the new global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are transmitted from the international to the national levels. We first consider a set of national‐level factors that many scholars have shown to be important determinants of IPR policy. We then supplement the standard emphasis on domestic factors with an analysis of new transnational factors: countries' multilateral obligations under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral pressures from the United States to increase the protection of IPRs. Population‐averaged panel data models are used to assess the effects of these national and transnational determinants on levels of software piracy in 80 countries from 1994 to 2002. Our results indicate that membership in the WTO and bilateral pressures from the United States—particularly pressures that offer reciprocal concessions—lead to substantial increases in levels of protection in rich and poor countries. There is, in short, a new international political economy of intellectual property.
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