IPE Theory in Transition

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The combined and interactive effects of advancing information technologies, and economic and financial globalization, have both accelerated and complicated certain state behaviors in the international economy. This panel investigates four less recognized ways in which states are responding to new opportunities and threats in IPE. State concerns about economic competitiveness are accelerated by a perverse but critical form of ever more important IPE behavior – economic espionage. This is illustrated dramatically by the recent, highly effective “Russian” hack into US federal agencies’ and corporate networks. Economic espionage is even more feasible and common than cybercrime or cyber warfare. Similarly, states are also confronted by a “new geography” of trade which has challenged them to pursue “thicker” forms of regionalism and cope with the effects of commercial clustering. As commercial clustering has created greater state vulnerabilities to external shocks, governments pursue means to insulate their economies from their extensive damage and their politics from more extreme forms of populism. In this context, the 2017-2019 US-China trade war ended this round of globalization and triggered the decoupling of economic ties between the two largest world economies. The unexpected, damaging worldwide effects of their decoupling raises a vital question—what new theoretical approach explains the mismatch between globalized technology, trade and capital, and the two ideologically-divided trading blocs? Finally, foreign aid now flows from multiple global funders to recipients at the global to local levels. National governments reside in the middle between the global funders and a wide range of public and private agencies or organizations. Given the wide variation in aid funding by geographic region, national sources, and recipient type, national governments and public organizations struggle to track the actual flow of aid and understand what donors define as ‘local’ recipients.

Sub Unit

• Division 16: International Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• Economic Espionage: A Framework for Future Research - William Akoto, Fordham University

• From Chimerica to Decoupling: US-China Trade War and Failed Neoliberalism - Wei Liang, Middlebury Institute of International Studies

• The Political Economy of Aid: Can We Follow the Money? - Emily K.M. Scott, University of Birmingham; Merve Erdilmen, McGill University

• The New Geography of Trade - Gary Winslett, Middlebury College

Chair

• Emily K.M. Scott University of Birmingham

Discussant

• David A. Deese Boston College