Provision Of International Public Goods Research Articles

Hegemony Studies 3.0: The Dynamics of Hegemonic Orders

After the end of World War II, various iterations of hegemony studies focused on such topics as the connection between hegemonic powers and the provision of international public goods, the causes of war during hegemonic transitions, and the stability of hegemonic orders. In this article, we discuss and forward the emergence of a new wave of international hegemony studies. This research program concerns itself with the politics of hegemonic orders and hegemonic ordering. It treats hegemonic orders as means, mediums, and objects of cooperation and contestation. It sees hegemons as not simply order makers but also order takers whose domestic political processes significantly interact with the dynamics of international order. It incorporates insights about how different dimensions of hegemonic orders interact to shape the costs and benefits of hegemony. In short, it treats hegemony and hegemonic orders as objects of analysis amenable to multiple theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.

Private Security and the Provision of International Public Goods

We examine the effect of private maritime security on international public safety by analyzing International Maritime Organization vessel security data from 2007-2014. During this time a considerable spike in maritime piracy occurred in East Africa, West Africa and East Asia. We exploit the fact that privately contracted armed security personnel are only legal in East and West Africa, finding that private security reduces the likelihood of a vessel being boarded by approximately 97 percent. Moreover, private security provides the international public good of maritime piracy prevention, as unsecured vessels are approximately 7 percent less likely to be boarded.

On the Voluntary Provision of International Public Goods

On the Voluntary Provision of International Public Goods

Going the American way: the surprising case of Korean pro-Americanism

Despite many predictions to the contrary, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is currently one of the countries with most pro-American attitudes. We investigate what is behind the extraordinary resilience in US popular standing in an allegedly least likely setting. Using survey data from 2002 and 2007 and a novel methodology, Classification and Regression Tree models, we test whether US standing is: (1) a matter of interests, i.e. a reward that the USA receives because it either provides security or international public goods; or (2) whether it is a matter of image, i.e. the recognition that the USA is a role model to emulate. We find that across a large number of predictors, the Korean public mostly liked the USA because they liked American ways of doing business, which gives support to the image hypothesis. Security interests played a secondary role in shaping US standing, while the provision of international public goods had no impact in the popular assessment of the USA in the ROK.

Environmental Protection and the Private Provision of International Public Goods

International environmental protection like the combat of global warming exhibits properties of public goods. In the international arena, no coercive authority exists that can enforce measures to overcome free‐rider incentives. Therefore decentralized negotiations between individual regions serve as an approach to pursue efficient international environmental protection. We propose a scheme which is based on the ideas of Coasean negotiations and Pigouvian taxes. The negotiating entities offer side‐payments to counterparts in order to influence their taxation of polluting consumption. Side‐payments, in turn, are self‐financed by means of externality‐correcting taxes. As we show, a Pareto‐efficient outcome can be attained.

Asymmetric Leadership and International Public Goods

The foreign assistance policies of major donor nations, the United NationsDevelopment Programme, and the World Bank have recently been redefined to explicitly address the provision of international public goods (IPGs). Examples of IPGs include peacekeeping, financial market stability, and biodiversity. Given the global heterogeneity across nations, it is therefore curious to find that most studies on which these redefinitions are based assume symmetric costs in the provision of IPGs. Within an evolutionary framework, the author analyzes the prospects for the voluntary provision of IPGs when the benefit/cost ratio varies across nations and characterizes the results for summation, weakest link, weaker link, best-shot, and better shot IPGs. The author demonstrates that a leading- by-example strategy by the country with the highest benefit/cost ratio can implement the cooperative outcome.

The Design of Supranational Organizations for the Provision of International Public Goods: Global Environmental Protection

An international environmental organization would need to be loosely structured initially with a focus on a narrow range of environmental issues. It also would need to emphasize consensus and limit the scope of its interventions to avoid defections by important participants. The benefits of such an organization include the potential for achieving more nearly optimal levels of environmental protection, cost savings from reduction of duplication and managerial economies of scale, and the strengthening of environmental interests in negotiations on the coordination of the environmental regime with other international regimes such as those focusing on trade or development.

Country size and the voluntary provision of international public goods

Standard studies on voluntary contributions to an international public good treat national economies as if they were single agents. This masks the fact that nations are comprised of populations of citizens, whose collective benefits a national government takes account of when deciding on the amount of the contributions. This paper constructs a model which explicitly allows for the effect of population differences and explores their consequences. We can then present the so-called exploitation of the great by the small by Olson and Zeckhauser [Olson, M., Zeckhauser, R., 1966. An economic theory of alliances. Review of Economics and Statistics 48 (1966) 266–279] and explore how residents of larger countries fare relative to those in smaller countries. We also elaborate on the effects of changing populations and show that growing into a large country is not necessarily beneficial for the country's residents.

The impact of actor heterogeneity on the provision of international public goods

The article formally analyses the conditions under which actor heterogeneity may have positive effects on the likelihood that international public goods will be provided, and when a hegemon chooses to act benevolently versus coercively toward the other actors. Within the theory of international cooperation the game‐theoretic model crucially rests on the key concepts of hegemonic stability theory. It illustrates with Nash equilibria the conditions under which a hegemon, which may act benevolently versus coercively, rationally chooses to give up the unilateral provision of international public goods under which followers rationally switch from free‐riding in their consumption of the public goods to taking part in leading. One implication of the model is that the emergence of joint economic leadership leads to multiple equilibria in the sense of allowing for multiple stable leadership constellations. The actors are in a mixed‐motive or coordination game where they have different preferences for the equilibria, and thus different preferences for which strategies to choose, and for who is to take part in covering the cost of the production of the public goods. This constellation gives rise to a second‐order conflict about which equilibrium to choose.

Efficient Institutions for the Private Enforcement of Law

OUR present legal institutions combine elements of private and public enforcement of law. If someone breaks your arm you call a policeman; if he breaks a window or a contract, you call a lawyer. Becker and Stigler have suggested that it would be advantageous to extend private enforcement into the area where law is now enforced publicly.' Their central argument is that the public system has perverse incentives. Suppose a policeman has evidence that will convict me of an offense, the punishment for which is equivalent (to me) to a twenty thousand dollar fine. If the cost to the policeman of "losing" the evidence is anything less than twenty thousand dollars, an opportunity exists for a mutually beneficial transaction. Preventing such transactions is costly. The solution proposed by Becker and Stigler is for the policeman's salary to consist of the fines produced by his activity. The only bribe he would then be willing to take would be one at least as large as the fine, in which case the "bribe" is simply a way of collecting the fine while avoiding the cost of a trial. In such a system the "policeman" is essentially a private agent. Becker and Stigler envisage a system of private enforcement firms that support themselves by the fines they collect from the criminals they apprehend and convict. If the criminal is judgment proof, the state would provide a reward equal to the fine the criminal would have paid if payment could have been enforced.