Political Economics Essay Samples

Theories of liberalism, realism and Marxism evolved at the different historical periods and have a large number of conceptual differences. First and foremost, each theory has a different goal. Marxism is mainly concerned with the class equity. Realism targets the state security. On the contrary, liberalism is more positive and targets beneficial bilateral or multilateral cooperation and consequent increase of the wealth.
Marxism emerged in the XIX century. In general, this theory was focused on the interests of the workers as the largest class of the society. For Marxists, the state is a non-neutral structure that represents the interests of the dominating societal classes, therefore the trade policies do not contribute to the wealth of all people in the society and the market relations are exploitative. On the contrary, realism highlights the importance of the state for power maximization and the market relations may bring much more power and dominance. In turn, the liberals think that there are a lot of stakeholders in the economic relations that can all win from the cooperation. Therefore the intervention into the market relations should be avoided. These three perspectives examine separate essential aspects of international political economy, so it is important to use all three perspectives in order to explain the global processes more precisely.
Cooperation has always been important for solving the regional and international economic and other problems, balancing the power between the various states, policy coordination and offering the rewards for the cooperating states. However, there are many obstacles that prevent cooperation. The realists think that cooperation is nearly impossible to achieve due to the lack of trust between the states. The liberals think that there should be more international institutions that would facilitate cooperation between the states. The international institutions might increase the level of security in the world and provide the possibility of cooperation for the countries instead of competing against each other. Moreover, the international institutions strive to harmonize the activity of the member states, set the universal frameworks in which the states will carry out their policies in the future. At the same time, there are many critics of the existing international institutions. Their main argument is that such institutions are unable to constrain the most powerful and self-interested states and the peaceful coexistence is only achieved through manipulation of the actions of the member states.
The domestic sources of foreign policy mainly depend on the domestic structure of the state. Usually the national governments, a variety of non-state actors, and the domestic society define the national interests and the governments receive the political authority to represent them in the international arena.
Degrees of institutionalization, support and salience influence the coordination of the domestic and foreign policy. Therefore a well-structured institutional environment allows the different actors to pursue their interests and influences the country’s foreign policy. In the developed and democratic institutional environment, nearly all actors have the ability to influence the policy outcomes. As the result, the policy preferences of the domestic groups are determined by the interaction of the various domestic economic interests, political institutions and the information that the different actors possess. In such environment, the political institutions have important determinative effects on the policy. In particular they set a regime in which the actors interact and act as mediators that provide the information about their domestic and foreign activity to the domestic audiences.
Expanding international migration has a number of advantages, First of all, labor mobility leads to better efficiency, because the people usually move to the areas where they can realize their potential and find work. Migration also leads to the increased production and trade flows between the countries. In general, migration has a large positive impact on the labor markets, prices, innovation and productivity.
However, international emigration may have a very negative effect on the countries from which the people move. The countries may experience a sharp decline in the population that is able to work and the economic and social problems become unavoidable in such countries. International emigration also creates a lot of new problems for the developed countries, because the level of unemployment may significantly increase, salaries may start to stagnate, a lot of resources will have to be spent on integrating the immigrants into the society in order to avoid the rise of crime, racism, xenophobia, etc.
The pros and cons of international migration cannot be determined only by the economic gains or losses because of the different reasons why the people decide to emigrate. Violence, hunger and a lot of other social problems make people leave their native countries. Therefore international migration is a very broad issue that needs to have a multi-dimensional analysis.
GATT was created to reduce or remove some of the trade barriers that constrained the development of the international trade. GATT organized several trade negotiations in which the majority of the developed countries were involved. The countries defined the rules that regulate the trade policy and therefore there are more or less equal trading conditions for every country nowadays. GATT promoted the following basic principles: most-favored-nation treatment, reciprocity, transparency, tariff binding and reduction. Most-favored-national treatment means that all contracting parties are offered the same conditions of trade. Reciprocity means that all contracting parties have similar rights and obligations, for example access to the markets based on the most-favored-nation treatment principle. Transparency means harmonization of the import protection, limited use of quotas and support of tariff-only import regimes. Finally, tariff binding and reduction became one of the main tasks when GATT was created. Now WTO, which is GATT’s successor, promotes very similar principles. There should be fair competition and no discrimination. The trade problems should be negotiated and the economic reforms should be encouraged in order to improve the environment in which the international trade is carried out. All principles relate to one another because they are targeted at the accomplishment of the main goal of GATT/WTO – development and fair regulation of international trade.
Regional trade agreements may lead to the creation of strategic alliances and better political and economic security in the countries. The regional agreements usually have a lot of additional objectives besides the trade-barrier reduction. Regional agreements help to increase the multilateral bargaining power, receive access to the large markets, reduce the risks of conflict between the countries, and achieve better multilateral and regional interaction in terms of investment, labor and environment policies, etc. Regionalism started to develop in the 1950s-1970s and was seen as a process of economic integration and creation of security alliances. Regionalism supporters thought that the economic integration would lead to the better political cooperation and the risk of war between the interacting countries would be reduced. In turn, the new regionalism started to emerge in the 1980s under the influence of the globalization process and end of the Cold War. New regionalism avoided the hegemony of the superpowers and is based on the development from within the regions. At the same time, new regionalism leads to better multilateral trade liberalization at the global level. Nevertheless, new regionalism restrains the effective work of the WTO and there is a potential risk of tensions between the regional coalitions that might try to receive the best trade preferences.