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dissertation topics international political economy

Best Political Economy Dissertation Topics in 2023

Political Economy Dissertation Topics: Universal political Economy is considered an interdisciplinary academic discipline, which assesses global and economic relations. IPE is mostly connected with international business, macroeconomics, improvement of financial aspects, and international advancement. Political economy is the study of how economic and political systems interact with and shape each other. It is a broad […]

political economy dissertation topics

Political Economy Dissertation Topics: Universal political Economy is considered an interdisciplinary academic discipline, which assesses global and economic relations. IPE is mostly connected with international business, macroeconomics, improvement of financial aspects, and international advancement.

Political economy is the study of how economic and political systems interact with and shape each other. It is a broad field that encompasses the ways in which economic policies and political institutions affect the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

Political economy also looks at how different economic systems, such as capitalism, socialism, and communism, function and how they influence political, social, and cultural outcomes. The study of political economy can help us understand how economic and political decisions impact people’s lives and how we can create more equitable and efficient societies.

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Table of Contents

Best Political Economy Dissertation Topics Ideas for Students

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  • The political economy of taxation in developing countries
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  • The influence of campaign finance on government decision-making
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  • The relationship between economic growth and political stability
  • The effects of globalization on labor markets
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  • The role of civil society in shaping economic policy
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  • The role of the state in shaping economic development
  • The impact of macroeconomic policies on poverty reduction
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  • The effects of urbanization on economic outcomes
  • The role of the private sector in economic development
  • The impact of development assistance on economic growth
  • The political economy of education financing

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  • The effects of financial sector development on economic growth
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  • The role of industrial policy in economic development
  • The impact of trade openness on economic growth
  • The political economy of natural resource management
  • The effects of infrastructure development on economic growth
  • The role of social protection in economic development
  • The impact of corruption on economic performance
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  • The role of the informal sector in economic development
  • The impact of climate change on economic outcomes
  • The political economy of public sector reform
  • The effects of technological change on employment
  • The role of regional integration in economic development
  • The impact of inequality on economic growth
  • The political economy of financial regulation
  • The effects of monetary policy on income distribution
  • The role of foreign direct investment in economic development
  • The impact of population aging on economic outcomes

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Article contents

International political economy: overview and conceptualization.

  • Renée Marlin-Bennett Renée Marlin-Bennett International Studies, Johns Hopkins
  •  and  David K. Johnson David K. Johnson Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.239
  • Published in print: 01 March 2010
  • Published online: 22 December 2017
  • This version: 22 January 2021
  • Previous version

The concept of international political economy (IPE) encompasses the intersection of politics and economics as goods, services, money, people, and ideas move across borders. The term “international political economy” began to draw the attention of scholars in the mid-1960s amid problems of the world economy and lagging development in the third world. The term “global political economy” (GPE) later came to be used frequently to illustrate that what happens in the world is not only about interactions between states and that the GPE includes many different kinds of actors. The survey aims at a comprehensive picture of the different schools of IPE, both historically and as they have developed in the early 21st century. Authors of antiquity, such as Aristotle and Kautilya, explored the relationship between the political and the economic long before the term “political economy” was coined, presumably by Antoine de Montchrestien in 1613. The mercantilist writings of the 17th and 18th centuries, including those of Colbert, Mun, and Hamilton, argued in favor of the state using its powers to increase its wealth. List, writing in the 19th century, emphasized the tension between national economic self-determination and free markets. The 19th- to 20th-century iteration of the mercantilist view can be found in the form of economic nationalist policies, which link to a realist approach to international relations more generally. Theorists of the Global South have adapted economic nationalist policies to address the problem of development. The liberal tradition of IPE also has historical antecedents, beginning with classical political economy. Examples include the influential works of Locke, Hume, Smith, and Ricardo. After World War II, the economic writings of Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman were influential. Variants of neoliberal IPE can be found from the 1950s with scholarship on integration and from the late 1970s with scholarship on international regimes. Late-20th-century and early-21st-century liberal scholarship has also explored varieties of capitalism and economic crises. An alternative stream of IPE can be traced through Marxian political economy, beginning with the work of Marx and Engels in the 19th century and proliferating globally. This approach provides a critique of capitalism. Other critical approaches that have emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries include feminist global political economy and postcolonial critiques of liberal and Marxian analyses. Trends in scholarship include analyses of China and transition of the neoliberal order, queer theory for global political economy, and studies of growing trends toward precarious forms of labor. A final section discusses research beginning in the 1990s that is relevant to the global political economy of transborder transmission of disease, a topic of special concern in light of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

  • international political economy
  • global political economy
  • mercantilism
  • economic nationalism
  • classical liberalism
  • neoliberal institutionalism
  • neoclassical liberalism
  • postcoloniality

Updated in this version

Light revision throughout, added discussions of postcoloniality and Covid-19

Introduction

Research in the field of international political economy, as described in this overview, includes work grounded in different schools of thought and drawing upon distinct conceptualizations of important concepts, relationships, and causal understandings. Antoine de Montchrestien ( 1889 ) is reputed to have introduced the term œconomie politique in his treatise of 1613 , by which he referred to the study of how states should manage the economy or make policy. The concept of international political economy has come to encompass a larger range of concerns, including the intersection of politics and economics, as goods, services, money, people, and ideas move across borders. The term “international political economy” (IPE) began to appear in the scholarly literature in the mid-1960s as problems of the world economy and development in the third world gained scholarly attention. The term “global political economy” (GPE) came into sporadic use at about the same time. GPE was (and is) often used more or less synonymously with IPE, though IPE approaches usually emphasize the individual nation-state as the basic unit of analysis, while GPE approaches tend to be more holistic, placing states and other kinds of actors within larger structures or the global system. Gill ( 1990 ) notes that in the 1980s, the terminological difference between IPE and GPE came to mark a difference in methodological orientation, mapping onto more or less “mainstream” and “critical” approaches, respectively. By the end of the 1990s, the GPE came to be used by both mainstream scholars (Gilpin, 2001 , and Cohn, 2016 , are examples) and critical scholars, although critical scholars are more likely to use GPE exclusively. (This article omits a full discussion of the development of IPE in the Global South and its engagement with GPE, a topic covered in Deciancio and Quiliconi, 2020 ). This survey of IPE and GPE scholarship proceeds in a roughly historical plan and consists of eight sections. It begins with some very early works on the intersection of politics and economics, and then it turns to the mercantilist school and its 20th-century successor, economic nationalism. The next section traces the development of the liberal tradition of political economy, including classical political economy, Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, and neoliberalism. This discussion is followed by sections on the Marxian, feminist, and postcolonial global political economy. The penultimate section briefly discusses some trends of scholarship in the 21st century , especially moving into the 2020s. The survey concludes with a discussion of scholarship (published prior to May 2020 ) that is relevant for assessing the global political economy reverberations of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Politics and Economics: Early Works

The study of the relationship between economic activities and state interests originated long before the term “political economy” was coined. Two examples of very early works include writings by Aristotle ( 384–322 bce ), who criticized Plato’s conception of communal ownership and placed the state in the role of guarantor of private property in The Politics , and Kautilya ( ca . 350–283 bce ), the Indian author of Arthashastra , a book of statecraft, who wrote of the need for the ruler to send spies to the marketplace to ensure fair weights and measures (Kautilya, 1915 ). In the Middle Ages, Islamic social theorist Ibn Khaldun ( 1332–1406 ) wrote about the relationship between governing structures and productivity of people (Ibn Khaldun, 1967 ). Another Muslim scholar of this era, Al-Maqrizi (d. 1442) ( 1994 ), analyzed governmental policies, including monetary policy. Niccolò Machiavelli ( 1469–1527 ), generally seen as a political theorist, was mindful of the relationship between the state and the economy as well, at least in the sense that a primary role of the prince or of a republican government is to protect private property. He called “public security and the protection of the laws [. . .] the sinews of agriculture and of commerce,” and suggested that the protection of property rights was important “so that the one may not abstain from embellishing his possessions for fear of their being taken from him, and [. . .] not hesitate to open a new traffic for fear of taxes” (Machiavelli, 1882 , p. 448; see also Machiavelli, 1979 , ch. XVI, on how princes ought to spend—or not spend—money).

Governments traditionally were held responsible for defending their own citizens’ property, but they had no such obligation toward conquered peoples. The European Age of Exploration led unsurprisingly to the expropriation of resources, since the purpose of those conquests was to bring home wealth in the form of gold, silver, and other precious materials. Enslavement of the indigenous peoples and profiting from their resources was considered consistent with natural law, as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle, argued in 1550 (Garcia-Pelayo, 1986 ).

Sepúlveda’s opinion was commonly, but not universally, held. The famous opposition to Spain’s inhuman treatment of indigenous people was published by Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1552 . He charged that the “avarice and ambition” that motivated the Spaniards and led them to perpetrate acts of barbarism were, to use a modern term, “illegitimate” (Las Casas, 2007 ). At a time when imperial conquest was considered the natural goal for states, Las Casas sounded a normative message—that the state cannot act with impunity and that the quest for riches does not excuse unjust forms of violence. The Sepúlveda–Las Casas debate prefigured future debates over the norms of international political economic interaction.

From Mercantilism to Economic Nationalism

Adam Smith referred dismissively to the various theories and policies on how states should intervene in markets to increase wealth and power as “mercantilism.” The more neutral-sounding “economic nationalism” became the successor term in more recent times. In both cases, assumptions about the role of the state conform to a general realist model, although a form of economic nationalism has also been espoused by theorists and polities of the Global South with the aim of “delinking” from relations of dependency on the North. This section traces the development of theories of mercantilism and economic nationalism from the 16th century to the 21st .

Mercantilism

The two-volume history of mercantilism by Eli Heckscher ( 1935 ) outlines at least four elements of this school of thought. Following List, and especially Schmoller, mercantilism is identified as the economic element of creating national states from disparate regions. Mercantilism is also characterized as a specific conceptualization of the nature of wealth that stresses the critical nature of inflows. The lack of reciprocal demand, the difficulty of facilitating accumulation in early agrarian societies, and the differential ability of various economic pursuits regarding generating employment opportunities are central to this element. A third characterization of mercantilism is as a body of policy designed to decrease the cost of inputs and facilitate production in the face of competition. Finally, mercantilism is characterized as a belief in the importance of enhancing the power and wealth of a state, so that it is better able to direct resources both at home and abroad. The best-known mercantilist theories focus on maintaining a positive balance of trade and payments by limiting imports or encouraging exports. One variant, bullionism, focuses on the desirability of increasing a country’s supply of gold and silver. (See Viner, 1937 , for a detailed history of English writings on mercantilism and “bullionism” prior to Adam Smith. A more recent and strongly proneoclassical liberal discussion of the relationship of historical theories of mercantilism to monetary policy can be found in Humphrey, 1999 .)

European exploration and conquest of new lands led to intellectual debate, starting in France in the 16th century , over which policies would best achieve these ends. An influx of gold and silver led to instability in the value of money. Commentators began to consider the government’s role in determining the value of money, the terms of trade, and other facets of what scholars since the mid- 20th century would call international political economy. Jean Bodin, for example, wrote in 1568 about how the value of specie would fluctuate with supply and demand and warned that government interference would only worsen the situation. “A ruler,” he wrote, “who changes the price of gold and silver ruins his people, country and himself” (cited in Turchetti, 2018 ). Instead, as Luigi Cossa ( 1880 , p. 117) noted, Bodin argued that the oversupply of money that resulted in price increases “would be turned to better advantage by a fiscal system promoting the growth of national manufactures in opposition to the excessive consumption of foreign goods.” Antoine de Monchrestien drew heavily on the work of Bodin to advocate for government protection of manufactures. (See Ashley, 1891 , and Perry, 1883 , for discussions of Monchrestien’s work.)

An influential supporter of mercantilism was Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance for King Louis XIV of France. He increased taxes, created benefits for production that would substitute for imports, and worked to bring wealth into the country through his policies, which were referred to as Colbertism. In 1664 , he wrote a memorandum to the king in which he argued “that only the abundance of money in a State makes the difference in its greatness and power.” He advocated government intervention in markets to increase domestic manufactures, to encourage imports of raw materials to be used for manufactures, and to support the exportation of manufactured goods. To encourage French traders to sell goods widely, he also advocated rewards for building or buying new ships and for long-distance voyages (Colbert, 1998 ). Thomas Mun, a director of the British East India Company, expressed similar views in a widely read defense of mercantilism. He argued that a country’s wealth is increased if a positive balance of trade is maintained. England should try to produce as much of what it must consume as possible and import as little as possible for its own consumption. People should tame their appetites to avoid wanting foreign garments and foods. However, having English traders purchase valuable wares from distant locales, bring them back to England, and, from England, reexport them would, according to Mun, serve to increase the national treasure. Mercantilism, in other words, would result in a net inflow of gold and silver—commodities not produced in any great quantity from English mines—and this would be the only way for England to increase its wealth (Mun, 1895 ).

The protectionist policies of mercantilism held considerable attractiveness as countries sought to industrialize and develop their economies. Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, provided a Report on Manufactures to Congress in which he outlined steps that the young country should take to secure its economy, especially in opposition to the economic might of other countries. Creating an economy based on manufactures, Hamilton argued, would protect the United States from being dependent on other countries “for military and other essential supplies.” He implicitly countered the argument of the physiocrats, discussed in the section “ Early Liberal Writers ,” who stressed the importance of agriculture over manufactures. Hamilton maintained that the country was best served by encouraging the development of manufacturing. Using machines would allow for the full employment of the population (including women and children) in order to increase the country’s self-sufficiency—and therefore its wealth and security (Hamilton, 1913 , p. 3).

Friedrich List, a German scholar and politician who later became a naturalized American citizen, extended Hamilton’s argument by emphasizing that states should take advantage of their own human resources—that is, the ability of people to produce agricultural and manufactured products through their innovation, hard work, and the natural environment. He argued that “it is of the utmost concern for a nation [. . .] first fully to supply its own wants, its own consumption with the products of its own manufactures,” he wrote. Only then should a country trade with others. List also developed the proposition that young economies could not compete with more established, more technologically advanced ones until the younger country had invested in developing its domestic industry. He emphasized “that a nation is richer and more powerful in proportion as it exports more manufactured products, imports more raw materials, and consumes more tropical commodities.” Government policies should therefore work toward these goals (List, 1909 , pp. 76–77). For a classic but much overlooked contribution to the tensions between protectionism and free trade in theories of IPE, see E. H. Carr ( 2001 , pp. 41–62).

Economic Nationalism

The 20th century marked a shift in theoretical labels. “Mercantilism” was supplanted by “economic nationalism,” a more neutral term and one that is more easily interpreted from a realist perspective. Economic nationalists are realists who expect the contest for wealth to mirror the contest for power in international relations. However, they often articulate a somewhat schizophrenic view: theorists who write about economic nationalism often see it as an unfortunate, economically inefficient, but unavoidable fact of international life. For example, in 1931 , T. E. Gregory criticized economic nationalism, but explained that such policies continued to be implemented because citizens and governments were reacting to six factors. They (a) feared “dependence on foreign markets for the sale of your products”; (b) saw “the danger of intervention in the domestic market by the foreign capitalist”; (c) desired “to reserve for the intelligence of the country itself such positions of honour and prestige as are offered by the existence of growing industries and a growing financial structure”; (d) realized “the undesirability of allowing [. . .] raw materials to be owned by foreigners”; (e) worried about the risk “that in a period of war, if you depend on foreign food supplies, you may find yourself in a very difficult situation, and therefore you ought to grow your own food”; and (f) believed that keeping “agriculture going as a type of economic production” would guarantee a supply of “vigorous manhood”—men who would be strong soldiers in times of war (pp. 292–294). Similarly, Gregory’s contemporary, Charles Schrecker, begins his discussion of “the causes, characteristics and possible consequences” of economic nationalism with the caveat that he “consider[s] this tendency [toward economic nationalism] in its ultimate effects to be regrettable and detrimental to the future economic welfare of humanity” (Schrecker, 1934 , p. 208).

This differentiation between the scholars’ personal beliefs and their analytical stance continues in more recent scholarship. Judith Goldstein ( 1986 ) discusses the principle of “free and fair” trade as a norm of U.S. trade policy, and she finds that while “free trade” is consistent with liberal economic analysis (which, by implication, she endorses), “fair trade” refers to protecting U.S. firms from unfair trade practices of other countries. In other words, U.S. trade policy ultimately pursues mechanisms that support the interests of those groups that capture the state and persuade policymakers of their claims. Eric Helleiner ( 2002 ), through a careful reading of the 19th-century economic nationalists, makes the sophisticated argument that economic nationalism has always been nationalist—that is, realist—first and economic second. In other words, he argues that countries choose economic policies for nationalist purposes. Sometimes these policies will be liberal, when it suits the country to deploy liberal policies; sometimes the policies will be protectionist, when protection is expected to lead to desired ends. In this analysis, liberal policies may be wholly consistent with theoretical explanations of economic nationalism. In a similar vein, Robert Gilpin clarifies the separation of analytical tools and preferred outcomes. He implicitly accepts the normative goals of liberalism while interpreting behavior in terms of “state centric realism,” a theoretical perspective closely connected to economic nationalism. He writes, “Although realists recognize the central role of the state, security, and power in international affairs, they do not necessarily approve of this situation. [. . .] It is possible to analyze international economic affairs from a realist perspective and at the same time to have normative commitment to certain ideals” (Gilpin, 2001 , pp. 15–16). Cohn ( 2016 ) elaborates these difficulties in the treatment of “neomercantilism.”

Economic Nationalism and Development

For many theorists, however, economic nationalism takes on a more positive hue when argued from the position of infant industries and developing country economies that need to develop internally before they can compete in global markets. Thus, tenets of economic nationalism have appealed to many writers in the Global South. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, could be considered a (somewhat ironic) example. Nyerere’s ujamaa (“familyhood”) policies can be divided into two: a frankly socialist “villagization” policy in which people were moved onto collective farms and a mercantilist self-reliance policy in which Tanzania was supposed to detach itself from dependence on the industrialized world. Ultimately, his policy failed on both counts: the collective farms were unproductive, Tanzania became more dependent on aid from other countries, and the democratic ideals of the movement deteriorated (Prashad, 2008 , pp. 191–203). The idea of self-reliance, however, resonates closely with economic nationalist emphasis on the ability of states to produce for their own basic needs (Amin, 1990 ; Nyerere, 1967 ).

In general, theories advocating import substitution industrialization fall into this category of developing country economic nationalism. Economist Raúl Prebisch, working on behalf of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, formulated the theory of dependent development, which explained how industrialization in the developing world could continue to keep countries dependent on advanced economies in the “core.” These peripheral country economies were too closely tied to production for export. Instead, he argued that developing countries needed to implement import-substituting industrialization (ISI) policies. By delinking from the dependent economic relationships that they have with core countries, developing countries could build their own economies. He advocated the mechanization of agriculture, industrialization, and technological advance (Prebisch, 1986 ). In short, “the fundamental arguments of [Alexander] Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures have a striking similarity with those of Prebisch and his staff” (Grunwald, 1970 , p. 826). (Of course, the results of ISI policies have been highly uneven. See, for example, the analysis of Albert Hirschman, 1968 , and Vijay Prashad, 2014 , on the difficulties of ISI as a development strategy.)

From Classical Liberalism to Neoliberal Institutionalism and Neoclassical Liberalism

In contrast to the emphasis on state power and state interests that characterizes mercantilism and economic nationalism, liberalism emphasizes possessive individualism and the individual as the bearer of rights (Macpherson, 1973 ). The political economic theory that results from the emphasis on the individual is grounded in the idea that markets should be allowed to function as freely as possible and that the purpose of economic activity is not to benefit the government but rather to benefit individuals who, through their efforts, earn income, purchase goods, and constitute the basic unit of economic life.

Early Liberal Writers

Among the most important of these liberal rights from the perspective of political economy is that of property. For John Locke ( 1884 ), the right to property was natural; for David Hume ( 1992 ), the right to property was the result of interactions over time between people. (See also Sugden, 1989 , on Hume’s view of property.) Liberals reject the idea that the purpose of the state is to gather wealth. Instead, the state exists to provide security and to safeguard property.

In the liberal tradition, “political economy” came to be associated expansively with the relationship between governments, markets, welfare, and wealth. Discourse on Political Economy by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( 1983 ), originally written for Diderot’s Encyclopédie , was an example of this. For Rousseau, political economy referred rather generally to those policies and laws that aim to protect and promote society being governed. What set Rousseau’s view apart from mercantilism was the liberal ethos that pervaded his writing: citizens were individuals who held rights; they had private wills; and collectively the community as a whole had a general will. States were bound by the rule of law and, in adhering to the general will, had the responsibility for protecting citizens’ rights, including property rights, but Rousseau was silent on what later writers would term “laissez-faire” policies, a free market vision of popular (as opposed to tyrannical) political economy. Instead, Rousseau seemed to have a very specific view of important government intervention in the economy: “One of the most important functions of the government” is to prevent extreme differences in wealth, since extremes of opulence and poverty erode the sense of “common cause” among citizens. To prevent such inequality and to provide the other functions of government, the state must tax, but, because the right to one’s own property was fundamental, taxation must be limited and levied fairly and progressively (those living at subsistence levels paying nothing, the rich paying relative to their wealth), in accordance with the general will. Rousseau’s popular political economy was thus liberal in protecting rights yet interventionist with respect to taxation and the uses of taxes.

The physiocrats introduced the idea of laissez-faire , laissez-passer (“let do and let pass,” in other words, the government should not interfere in the market) as a goal for states. They argued that the state should avoid intervention wherever possible, and especially avoid the taxation of agriculture. François Quesnay’s Economical Table presented a view of economics that placed a strong emphasis on the value of agriculture and the “sterility” of manufactures (Quesnay, 1968 ), in contrast to the mercantile emphasis on encouraging manufactures. The physiocrats favored agriculture because, in their calculation, the value of the output—crops—exceeded the value of the inputs used to produce the crops: land, labor, seeds, and the like. Artisans who manufactured things, the physiocrats maintained, only produced goods that equal the value of the inputs because competition would drive prices down to the level that only covered costs. Quesnay and the other physiocrats understood the limited supply of land and the ability of farmers to produce more than was needed for subsistence as evidence of the superior productivity of agriculture (Quesnay, 1968 ; also Bilginsoy, 1994 ). A major policy goal of the physiocrats was to “prevent deviations of the market price of industrial goods from their fundamental price, and to guarantee the maintenance of the proper price in the agricultural sector—the price high enough to cover the unit costs and rent” (Bilginsoy, 1994 , p. 531). The government, in their view, should limit taxes on agricultural products to ways that meet this goal. The French policies then in place of protecting manufacturers from foreign imports and of the government selling the right to tax farming to wealthy citizens thus had a particularly deleterious effect on the economy (Quesnay, n.d. ).

Adam Smith, whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is often seen as the foundational work in the field of political economy, built on the work of the physiocrats, as well as that of Hume. Smith, who first referred to political economy in the eighth paragraph of the introduction to the book, understood the term as concerning causal theories about what governments believe they ought to do—which policies they think they should implement—to increase their wealth. The purpose of political economy, according to Smith ( 1904 ), was

first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign. (Book IV, Introduction)

The first purpose is achieved primarily through free markets, with Smith advocating for reliance upon “invisible hand.” The second is achieved through some government involvement in the economy, including the provision of funds for militias to defend against foreign invaders; setting up a system to pay for the administration of justice (with revenues for this purpose coming, perhaps, from court fees); providing public works such as roads, bridges, and postal services (which, with fees attached, may produce revenue for the government); and education (Viner, 1948 ).

For what later came to be known as international political economy, Adam Smith, like the physiocrats before him, made a major intellectual contribution with his rejection of the common mercantile practices of his age. In contrast to mercantilists like Colbert and Mun, Smith opposed the government’s intervention in markets to maintain a positive balance of trade. Smith ( 1904 ) wrote:

We trust, with perfect security, that the freedom of trade, without any attention of government, will always supply us with the wine which we have occasion for; and we may trust, with equal security, that it will always supply us with all the gold and silver which we can afford to purchase or to employ, either in circulating our commodities or in other uses. (IV.1.11)

Some IPE scholars, however, have highlighted Smith’s “agonism” in relation to the contradictions of the free market system, reading Smith not so much as an unequivocal supporter of the laissez-faire economics, as he is often assumed to be, but rather as a careful observer of the positive and negative aspects of the market economy (Arrighi, 2007 ; Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010 ; Shilliam, 2020 ). This reading both contributes to a reappraisal of the classical tradition and serves as a critique of its contemporary reception in neoclassical economic theory, suggesting a different path for economic studies at large.

Immanuel Kant, in his famous essay on perpetual peace, extended the liberal optimism about the beneficial effects of trade. An international federation of republics would naturally trade with each other, and the positive effects of commerce would stand as a bulwark against hostilities. “The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people. For among all those powers (or means) that belong to a nation, financial power may be the most reliable in forcing nations to pursue the noble cause of peace (though not from moral motives)” (Kant, 1983 , p. 125). Thus, as scholars such as Jahn ( 2013 ) and Ince ( 2018 ) have demonstrated, classical liberal thought has always contained an essentially international dimension, the study of which is instructive for understanding later forms of liberal IPE.

Comparative Advantage

An important question for international political economy is, Why engage in international trade? In On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation , Englishman David Ricardo ( 1821 ) built upon Smith’s support for international trade. In this work, Ricardo outlined the theory of comparative costs (comparative advantage), a cornerstone of trade theory to the present day. The common view had been that states trade with one another when one has an absolute advantage in the production of something and the trading partner has an absolute advantage in the production of something else. (If England produced cloth more cheaply than Portugal did, and Portugal produced wine more cheaply than England did, then both countries would profit from trade.) Ricardo’s insight was that even if a country produced both wine and cloth more cheaply than another, it still made sense for the countries to specialize in and export that good it had the greatest advantage in producing. This theory depended on another theoretical contribution from Ricardo, the labor theory of value: the value of a product can be represented in the amount of labor (person-hours) needed to produce it (a good summary of the theory can be found in Ruffin, 2002 ).

Comparative advantage continued to be a topic of discussion in international political economy. Swedish economists Eli Hecksher and Bertil Ohlin ( 1991 ) contributed a major extension of Ricardo’s theory by focusing on the role that factor endowments play in determining comparative advantage. Since land, labor, and capital move less easily than goods, a country should specialize in those products that are produced with the factors that are relatively abundant in the country. (Jacob Viner, 1937 , pp. 500–507, provided a summary and critical analysis of this theory, and Wolfgang Stolper and Paul Samuelson further developed the theory by examining what happens to prices when two countries move from not trading to trading. The consequence can be higher prices, which can affect income distribution, as discussed in Lindert and Kindleberger, 1982 , pp. 58–60.)

Some scholars have begun to note areas in which the traditional understanding of comparative advantage no longer fits the evidence. For example, Michael Storper ( 1992 ) finds that

the world of production has changed fundamentally since the time of Ricardo. We now live in a world where factors of production for technologically stable products are not endowed, but produced as intermediate inputs. Almost any developed country making the effort can become as efficient as the next country in a technologically stable manufacturing sector. (pp. 63–64)

Storper ( 1992 ) argues that products that depend on technological innovation are traded with respect to “technological advantage” rather than comparative advantage.

Another question about the validity of comparative advantage is raised by strategic trade theory. James Brander and Barbara Spencer ( 1985 , p. 83) showed how protection through subsidies would “change the initial conditions of the game that firms play” and make a firm more profitable. By calibrating the protection properly—not too much, not too little—states, according to strategic trade theory, can lead to an equilibrium that may be jointly suboptimal, but the protecting country still gains because its firm is able to earn more. Although strategic trade theory shares some elements with mercantile support for the protection of infant industry, those arguing for strategic trade theory place themselves within a liberal model and seek rational intervention at the best possible levels (i.e., levels that provide net benefits). Some scholars suggest that strategic trade theory is most useful when considering the challenges faced by industries when there are large economies of scale, high learning curves, and knowledge-intensive advanced manufacturing processes. Paul Krugman and others offer a cautionary note, however. The benefits of strategic trade theory fall mainly to the protected firm or industry, not to the domestic economy. Overall costs are likely to outweigh benefits, especially when protectionism leads to trade war (Krugman, 1994 ).

Two Strands of Liberalism: Keynesianism and Neoclassical Liberalism

As the questions raised by strategic trade theory suggest, liberals wrestle with the appropriate role of the state in the economy. Since the middle of the 20th century , liberalism has been bifurcated into two major strands: Keynesianism and neoclassical liberalism. Keynesian economics, named after John Maynard Keynes, sees direct government intervention in markets as a way to improve welfare and make the economy function better, especially given inescapable market failures and inefficiencies. Neoclassical economics, sometimes understood as libertarianism, draws on the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and others who believed that governments had become too involved in the economy and that freedom suffered as a result. Keynesianism filtered into international political economy, with variants consistent with integration theory, neoliberal institutionalism, and regimes (which are a form of neoliberal institutionalism). Neoclassical liberalism can be seen in the “Washington Consensus,” which has led to deregulation of global and domestic economies, decreases in foreign aid, and further reliance on marketization.

Keynesianism and Neoliberal Institutionalism

John Maynard Keynes ( 1883–1946 ) served on the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 . He resigned from this position in opposition to the draconian terms of peace. The Allies, in ending the war “with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds” (Keynes, 1920 , I.4). During World War II, he served on the British delegation in the Bretton Woods negotiations on the postwar monetary order. Central to Keynesian economics is the idea that free markets will not ( contra classical theory) always find an equilibrium at full employment. Instead, crises of underemployment call for public expenditures, for example, in public works (Keynes, 1936 , 1937 ; Galbraith, 1968 .)

Integration Theory

An important inference from Keynesianism is that institutions and governance can be used to create better political, social, and economic outcomes. In contrast to economic nationalism and to neoclassical economics, as James Caporaso ( 1998 , pp. 3–4) noted, integration theorists understood that institutions matter because institutions alter the conditions in which exchanges of various kinds take place by establishing rules. In addition, integration theorists explicitly tied a goal of peaceful relations among nations to integration: liberal markets, with well-functioning institutions, would lead to peaceful outcomes that would be conducive to commercial ties, which would once again feed back and encourage more cooperation. Drawing on both Keynesian liberalism and contributions from sociology to an understanding of cooperative action (Parsons, Shils, & Smelser, 2001 ), integration theory sought a formula for creating the institutions that would promote positive, peaceful outcomes.

Historically, integration theory emerged with discussion by David Mitrany ( 1948 ) of functionalism and world organization. With the cataclysmic effects of both world wars firmly in mind, Mitrany described a world in which functional integration—cooperation and institution building on specific functional tasks and in specific functional areas—would lead to a more peaceful outcome. He wrote:

If one were to visualize a map of the world showing economic and social activities, it would appear as an intricate web of interests and relations crossing and recrossing political divisions comes that would be conducive to commercial, but a map pulsating with the realities of everyday life. They are the natural basis for international organizations: and the task is to bring that map, which is a functioning reality, under joint international government, at least in its essential lines. The political lines will then in time be overlaid and blurred by this web of joint relations and administrations. (Mitrany, 1948 , pp. 358RERL)

Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas both furthered the study of how functional cooperation may lead to political cooperation. Deutsch found “economic ties,” communication across territorial borders and social strata, “mobility of persons,” and a wide range of different kinds of communication and transaction (among other factors) to be necessary conditions for amalgamation of separate states into a “security-community” (Deutsch, 1957 , p. 58). Haas ( 1964 ) further emphasized the connection between liberalism and functional integration theory. “Integration,” he wrote, “is conceptualized as resulting from an institutionalized pattern of interest politics, played out within existing international organizations. [. . .] There is no common good other than that perceived through the interest-tinted lenses worn by the international actors” (p. 35). Having functional interests in common, states would be able to cooperate, especially when international organizations create the conditions that would facilitate cooperation. Unfortunately, this theory failed in that the hopeful expectations about how international organizations would foster integration and peaceful cooperation did not come to fruition (at least not in the near term, after the publication of these works). Philippe Schmitter offered a revision of the theory that was at once more modest in its predictions and less precise in its specifications of complex expected interactions. Schmitter ( 1970 ) thus presents a less deterministic version: under some conditions, integration may result from the complex functional interactions of states.

Interdependence, Regimes, and Neoliberal Institutionalism

Although it soon became apparent that the hopeful expectation about how international organizations would foster integration and peaceful cooperation would not come to fruition, the main liberal tenets of integration theory continued to play a role in IPE theory. Neoliberal institutionalism soon superseded integration theory as the major approach to IPE among those who followed this Keynesian side of liberalism. The “institutionalism” in neoliberal institutionalism may have been drawn from the economics literature, in which institutionalism referred to “an approach which stresses the interactions between social institutions and economic relationships and aspects of behavior, aims to present an orderly arrangement of economic phenomena in which institutions are elevated from the status of the exception and the footnote, and integrated with the main body of economics” (Eveline Burns, in Homan et al., 1931 , p. 135). Both sociology (Parsons, 1935 ) and political science (Apter, 1957 ) adopted the term, to refer to approaches that explore how organized groups are and what they do in society.

Early links between institutionalism and political economy can be found in an International Studies Association conference panel on “Patterns of International Institutionalism” (Rohn, 1968 ). James March and Johan Olsen ( 1984 ) reviewed the revival of institutionalist thought in political science in the 1970s and 1980s and suggested that the new institutionalism is “simply an argument that the organization of political life makes a difference.” From this parsimonious insight, however, institutionalists opened the examination of how cooperative interactions could regularly, even ubiquitously, comprise IPE. These investigations resulted in the development of both interdependence theory and the concept of international regimes.

“Interdependence,” encapsulating various kinds of interactions and mutual dependencies that promoted peaceful interactions, did not rise to the level of significant scholarly appreciation until the 1970s. The idea had been around for a while. In 1958 , John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State of the United States, referred specifically to interdependence when he asserted that providing development aid and encouraging trade would combine with military security cooperation to prevent developing countries from falling into the Soviet orbit. A few years later, Vincent Rock ( 1964 ) suggested, perhaps in a fairly unrealistic vein, that interdependence in scientific, trade, and other kinds of interactions would lead to peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. Edward L. Morse refined the concept of interdependence to argue that the “low policies” that involved economic transactions and welfare interests were becoming more important for international relations than the “high policies” of military strategic concerns. Consequently, “the classical goals of power and security have been expanded to, or superseded by, goals of wealth and welfare. [. . .] [T]he old identification of power and security with territory and population has been changed to an identification of welfare with economic growth” (Morse, 1970 , pp. 379–380). Richard Cooper ( 1972 , p. 159) further developed the idea “to refer to the sensitivity of economic transactions between two or more nations to economic developments within those nations.” Cooper, however, saw interdependence as a policy conundrum for states, rather than as a means to more peaceful outcomes in international relations. Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein ( 1973 , p. 22) emphasized the unpredictability of the situation in the 1970s: “Whether interdependence will emerge as positive or negative will depend largely on old-fashioned cooperation among governments.”

In a 1974 publication, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., focused on interdependence between the United States and Canada. Drawing on Oran Young’s definition of interdependence (Young, 1968 ), Keohane and Nye ( 1974 , p. 606) studied “patterns of interdependence, particularly with regard to symmetry” on policy issues and how patterns of interdependence were “used as sources of bargaining power.” Keohane and Nye ( 1977 ) further developed this concept into “complex interdependence,” in which actors would have varying levels of sensitivity or vulnerability to each other across “multiple channels” (i.e., across different issue areas) in which military issues would not be more important but rather there would be no clear hierarchy among the issues; and in which these ties across these issues would preclude the use of military force.

Attention to interdependence and international institutions highlighted how states and other actors were sensitive and vulnerable to each other. Scholars also questioned whether the interdependence would lead to coordinated action to solve collective international public goods problems. Even if integration, in the functional sense, was not happening completely and directly, could some sort of coordination short of full-fledged integration be going on? International “regimes,” a term borrowed from the legal scholarship by Ernst B. Haas, provided a tentative affirmative answer to this question. In Haas’s description, international regimes were “collective arrangements among nations designed to create or more effectively use scientific and technological capabilities” and that would “minimize the undesired consequences associated with the creation and exploitation of such capabilities” (Haas, 1975b , p. 147; see also Haas, 1975a ). Later debates over the definition of the term included Haas’s restatement: “ Regimes are norms, rules, and procedures agreed to in order to regulate an issue-area ” (Haas, 1980 , p. 358 (emphasis in the original); see also Young, 1980 ). Keohane and Nye ( 1977 , p. 19), in their book on interdependence, took up the issue of regimes as well, referring to them as “the sets of governing arrangements that affect relationships of interdependence.”

The concept of regimes became more formalized in 1982 with the publication of a special issue of the journal International Organization edited by Stephen D. Krasner ( 1982a ), which was republished as an edited book (Krasner, 1983 ). The group of influential scholars writing for this publication agreed upon a uniform definition:

Regimes can be defined as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors that affect relationships of interdependencees” (Haasterdependence would lead to coordinated action to solve collective inte. Norms are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice. (Krasner, 1982b , p. 186)

Under this umbrella definition, the authors divided themselves into three separate groups: those who understood regimes to be ubiquitous, “Grotians,” since their views were consistent with that of the 17th-century scholar of international law, Hugo Grotius (Young, 1980 ; e.g., Puchala & Hopkins, 1982 ); those who saw in regimes a possibility for states to escape—sometimes—the pessimistic outcomes of a realist world by creating opportunities for rational actors to cooperate (the “modified structuralists,” like Stein, 1982 ); and those, represented in the volume by Susan Strange ( 1982 ), who thought that regimes obscured, rather than elucidated, what was really going on in the world. (None of these authors questioned who “gave” the issue area, or how it was given, a question that was later raised by constructivists such as Onuf, 1989 , and Marlin-Bennett, 1993 .)

Notwithstanding criticisms, the usefulness of the analytical construct of regimes was that it shifted attention to issues, those questions of international political economy around which negotiations were held, agreements struck, deals kept or not kept. The regimes literature spawned a host of studies of different kinds of issues. By looking at the institutions and the normative structures that made cooperation possible, regimes theorists and empirical researchers opened up the opportunity to see how the vast majority of interactions in the world—those that do not involve military hostilities—actually occur and are ordered. Among the many such works are Rittberger ( 1993 ), Martin and Simmons ( 1998 ), Nadelmann ( 1990 ), Nye ( 1987 ), Peterson ( 2005a ), and Cogburn ( 2017 )

The attention to institutions and the role they play under conditions of a relatively liberal international political economy led scholars to start referring to all these approaches to integration and regimes in a globalizing world as “neoliberal institutionalism” (Keohane, 1984 ). Often contrasted with structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism assumes that rational actors can cooperate under conditions of anarchy because institutions provide rules that the actors are willing to accept and because actors are happy with absolute gains, rather than struggling for relative gains (as a state-centric realist or economic nationalist would assume), from any set of proposed arrangements. Many, however, see flaws in the theoretical edifice of neoliberal institutionalism. Robert Powell ( 1991 ), for example, suggests that both structural realism and neoliberal institutionalism are special cases of a single model of states attempting to pursue their interests under conditions of anarchy and constraints imposed by different capabilities among the actors in the system. Others contest neoliberal institutionalism’s empirical validity (Drezner, 2001 , among others) and its conceptualization of anarchy (Grieco, 1988 ). Yet others disagree with the implicit assumption that neoliberal institutionalist cooperation is good , that cooperation necessarily leads to more peaceful, more materially comfortable, and more emancipatory outcomes (Keeley, 1990 ; Kokaz, 2005 ; Marchand, 1994 ). The intellectual history by Cohen ( 2008 ) provides an overview and assessment of the development of regimes theory.

Neoclassical Liberalism

The other major stream of liberalism diverges from the neoliberal institutionalism and the Keynesian emphasis on coordination through regulation of (global) economic interactions. The neoclassical liberals, including economists of the Austrian School and leading U.S. economists such as Milton Friedman, understood government intervention as damaging to markets and consequently to the economic freedoms of society. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. von Hayek, two leaders of the Austrian School, advocated antisocialist, antigovernment intervention policies (Hayek, 1994 ; von Mises, 1998 ).

Milton Friedman similarly argued in favor of letting markets operate without government intervention. Government policies that seek to manipulate markets for political outcomes are unavoidable errors, in his view. In an article coauthored with Anna J. Schwartz, the economists conclude that

leaving monetary and banking arrangements to the market would have produced a more satisfactory outcome than was actually achieved through governmental involvement. Nevertheless, we also believe that the same [political] forces that prevented that outcome in the past will continue to prevent it in the future. (Friedman & Schwartz, 1986 , p. 311)

For Friedman, the role of government is important but limited. With Rose Friedman, he wrote:

“Government is essential both as a forum for determining the ‘rules of the game’ and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.” Markets, on the other hand, “reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby [. . .] minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game.” (Friedman & Friedman, 1982 , p. 15)

The ascendancy of laissez-faire economics resulted in the dominance of the “Washington Consensus,” which changed the way the international financial institutions (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and governments made policies on foreign aid from the 1980s through the 1990s. Proponents of the Washington Consensus placed efficiency of the economy as their highest objective. Further, they did so under the assumptions that efficiency was good and that they understood mechanisms of economics sufficiently to identify good, efficient policies (Williamson, 1993 , p. 1330). Though pursuing equity or more fair distribution of resources had often been considered a goal of policy, supporters of the Washington Consensus were not concerned with equity; at best, they saw the possibility that some improvements in equity could come about “as a byproduct of seeking efficiency objectives” (Williamson, 1993 , p. 1329). As Dani Rodrik ( 2006 ) sardonically recounted:

Any well-trained and well-intentioned economist could feel justified in uttering the obvious truths of the profession: get your macro balances in order, take the state out of business, give markets free rein. “Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize” became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world and of the political leaders they counseled. (p. 973)

Ultimately, the popularity of the Washington Consensus waned as it failed to produce positive economic growth in developing countries. By 2005 , the World Bank issued a careful analysis of the failures of its own policies that implemented the neoclassical economics of the Washington Consensus (Zagha & Nankani, 2005 ). The failure of the Washington Consensus cast attention back onto other liberal, but not neoclassical, political economy theories, specifically those dealing with how institutions can resolve externalities and other forms of market failure in an otherwise liberal global political economy.

In the wake of the decline of the Washington Consensus and the financial crisis beginning in 2008 , special mention of the scholarship of Susan Strange must be made. Strange, who could be classified, broadly, as a liberal in her understanding of markets and efficiency, strongly criticized the neoclassical position. She understood that markets did not function in the absence of good governance. Indeed, in 1986 and again in 1998 she analyzed a global political economy in which states had ceded control to markets, with the expectation of disastrous results for volatility and the health of the global economy (Strange, 1986 , 1998 ). She saw clearly the danger of fast-moving financial flows in a global political economy in which no government provided the appropriate regulation to ensure fair dealing and protect against the negative externalities that result when rational self-interested agents pursue their self-interest in the absence of such regulation. No one has been overseeing the global financial system, and the result has been, as Strange ( 1986 ) predicted, serious harm.

Strange’s contributions have only been confirmed in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 , in response to which liberal theorists have been challenged to critically reformulate the ideal and real relations between market forces and state planning. Landmark works in the empirical study of financial crisis and contemporary inequality such as Picketty ( 2014 ) and Tooze ( 2018 ) are essential contributions to the study of the contemporary salience of finance and financial crisis in contemporary global capitalism. Indeed, as John Ikenberry ( 2018 ) observes, the liberal international order faces grave challenges from resurgent economic nationalisms and social conservatisms. In addition to this 21st-century political challenge, the liberal tradition has historically been most broadly and deeply challenged by Marxian theories of global political economy.

Marxian Global Political Economy

The third major school of thought in international political economy has been Marxism, along with several “neo”-variants. Karl Marx, along with Friedrich Engels and (later) Vladimir Lenin, is considered the progenitor of a political economy that emphasizes the role class plays in society. Although the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the systemic changes within the People’s Republic of China have demonstrated the failures of Marxian-influenced policies, Marxian thought offers a useful critique of the structure of the global political economy by shedding light on capitalism and the production of inequities.

Marx, writing in the mid- 19th century , combined philosophical investigation of political economy with activism. He witnessed a world that was being changed by industrial development, in which the workers were increasingly subject not just to the authority of the state but also to the control of the capitalist. Marx adapted Hegel’s dialectic to the material world, seeing the contradictions within capitalism driving change, which he expected to lead to revolutionary transformation of society. This notion of the dialectic and the teleological view of history—that these contradictions would inexorably lead to a communist society as the predictable end state and (ironically, somewhat self-contradictorily) that this unavoidable revolutionary change should be fomented—has not been borne out and, arguably, has been contradicted. The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1983 ) remains, though, the clearest explication of Marx’s view.

In terms of the development of political economy, Marx broke with the liberals in his identification of the sphere of production, as opposed to the sphere of exchange, as the focal point of sociopolitical and economic dynamics. Market mechanisms were relatively fixed, but the politics of production—whether it is on land used to grow food or on the shop floor—determined the nature and dynamics of the social order. Though there are several “Marxian” variations of the broad sweep of history, we basically find a succession of stages that are differentiated by the nature of the ownership of the means of production. Early history is characterized as an era of “primitive capitalism” without specialization where all members of the human community were essentially equal in the tasks they pursued and the status they held. A long period characterized by slavery followed, where some people subjugated others to the status of chattel and appropriated their labor power directly. This system is inefficient and comes to be plagued with high costs involved in maintaining order and overseeing production. In Europe, the period of slavery is followed by feudalism, where direct ownership of individuals ends, but peasants are nonetheless tied to the land, which itself can be owned. The peasant thus owes the owner of the land a level of labor dues. The transition to capitalism emerges when the social relations of production (the social overlay of the feudal system in this latest stage) become impediments to further development. Feudalism’s limits lead to changes that find landowners failing to control their charges, and peasants taking up a new position in the economy. They are stripped of their land and put in a position where they must sell their labor power in the market for a wage.

Marx extended this concept of alienated labor in two ways that are important for the study of global political economy. First, he emphasized the alienation of labor as the definitive element in the capitalist system. The division of labor in an industrializing society meant that workers would have no choice but to sell their labor power as a commodity to survive. In doing so, the worker sells his power of production to the capitalist. The alienation of the worker from his own labor gives a special viciousness to the class relations that characterize the capitalist mode of production (Marx, 1983a ). Second, Marx examined how the alienation of labor led to the accumulation of “surplus value,” the profit that accrued to the capitalist when the price of a good exceeded the wages the capitalist paid the laborer for its production. The wage laborer would only earn enough for their subsistence, but the capitalist would be able to take in the surplus, which would be much greater than that needed for the capitalist’s subsistence (Marx, 1983b ).

Vladimir Lenin’s tract, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism—A Popular Outline , brought Marxian thought into the global political economy. Lenin extended Marx’s predictions, showing how capitalism would spread around the world, leading to an ultimate contradiction of inter-imperialist conflict. As capitalism became more advanced, the accumulation of surplus value led to the concentration of ownership through the rise of monopolies. Bank ownership became concentrated and closely interconnected with the interests of monopoly capital. According to Lenin, the results were monopolistic “finance capital.” Further, the connections between capital and banks were “completed” by tight connections between each of these and the state. The consequence, Lenin wrote, was a shift in capitalism. “Under old capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become the typical feature” (Lenin, 1982 , p. 62). He argued that the “superabundance of capital” in the advanced capitalist countries drove exports, and capitalism spread throughout the world. Furthermore, imperialism was the natural result, as finance capital moved to expropriate the raw materials of the colonies. The result was the immiseration of the masses, both within the advanced capitalist countries and abroad, “for uneven development and wretched conditions of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and premises of this mode of production” (Lenin, 1982 , pp. 62–63 [emphasis in the original]). The ultimate contradiction between capitalism and monopoly and the push for domination eventually must lead, Lenin stated, to inter-imperialist rivalry and, finally, the decay of monopoly capitalism.

Where Marx saw the spread of the capitalist mode of production to all societies as inevitable, other critical scholars were concerned that capitalism was creating not models of itself but of a new kind of social order. Dependency scholars argued that instead of facilitating the growth of capitalism in the third world, capitalist and imperialist actions were leading to a system where real capitalism could not possibly develop. What we were witnessing, they argued, was “the development of underdevelopment” (Gunder Frank, 1969 ). Dependency scholars argued that capitalist interests often strengthened precapitalist forms of exploitation. Hence, large landowners would solidify their position in a society by reaping the benefits of a captive population of laborers in a system more akin to feudalism than capitalism, but without the internal contradictions that would lead to its transformation. The ability of one society to warp the subsequent developmental path of another, given the incentives that trade relations with capitalists offered, was described by Sweezy ( 1942 ), Baran ( 1957 ; Baran & Sweezy, 1969 ), Gunder Frank ( 1969 ), Cardoso and Faletto ( 1979 ), dos Santos ( 1970 ), and Amin ( 1976 ). Amin, for example, examined how accumulation differs in the core of developed countries and the periphery of developing countries. In the wealthier core, the masses are essentially co-opted through the production and availability of the consumer goods needed to satisfy them. In the periphery, production is focused on luxury goods and exports, thereby further enriching the dominant classes and leaving the needs of the masses unfulfilled and the people marginalized.

Marxist scholars considered this analysis to be flawed by its concern for actions taking place in the sphere of exchange (trade between core and periphery) and not the sphere of production (more class-based analysis). Supporters of the original Marxian formulation like Laclau ( 1971 ) and Warren ( 1973 ) produced critical analyses of dependency arguments. Brenner ( 1977 ) labels dependency and related schools of thought “neo-Smithian” in orientation and therefore fundamentally un-Marxian.

Dependency scholarship was quite popular given its ability to explain both underdevelopment and the failure of class politics to grow along traditionally identified Marxist paths. In the 1970s, Immanuel Wallerstein brought dependency and a desire to reconceptualize the developmental paths of the advanced industrial states in the long-term approach of Fernand Braudel ( 1982–1984 ) together to form world-systems analysis. Wallerstein ( 1974 ) dated the origins of the development of the “capitalist world-economy” to the long 16th century . He was able to add political and cultural conditions to the essentially materialist analyses of longer-term critical history. Wallerstein ( 2004 ) understands a world-economy as

A large geographic zone within which there is a division of labor and hence significant internal exchange of basic or essential goods as well as flows of capital and labor. A defining feature of a world-economy is that it is not bounded by a unitary political structure. Rather, there are many political units inside the world-economy, loosely tied together in our modern world system in an interstate system. And a world-economy contains many cultures and groups—practicing many religions, speaking many languages, differing in their everyday patterns. This does not mean that they do not evolve some cultural patterns, what we shall be calling a geoculture. It does mean that neither political nor cultural homogeneity is to be expected or found in a world-economy. What unified the structure most is the division of labor which is constituted within it. (p. 23)

Wallerstein also came under critical scrutiny for keeping “capitalism” at the core of his analysis. Scholars like Chase-Dunn and Hall ( 1991 , 1997 ) sought to push the elements of world-system analysis to earlier eras in explicitly comparative work. Others, like Gunder Frank and Gills, argued for the abandonment of “capitalism” as the core of global developmental concerns, and argued for the development of a world system history that would cover the last 5,000 years of human history (Gunder Frank, 1998 ; Gunder Frank & Gills, 1993 ). All these works are essentially emancipatory in their intent. They share the view that poverty is a central problem, that global inequalities should be addressed, and that remedies must be adopted.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci continues to have a major influence on the field of international political economy. Gramsci, who was influenced by Marx, Lenin, and other socialist and communist thinkers, contributed the concept of Gramscian hegemony to the study of IPE. While in liberal and realist IPE, hegemony simply refers to a single state having a preponderance of power, Gramsci looked at the complex interconnection between the material and productive base of the social order (the structure) and philosophy, ideas, culture, and relationships (the superstructure). Hegemony is in place “in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge” (Gramsci, 1988 , p. 292). For Gramsci, a class is hegemonic when it is able to lead through the consent of those it controls, because of this complex set of dominant “ethico-political” ideas, and through force, in terms of ownership and organization of economic activity. Giovanni Arrighi ( 1994 ) summarizes Gramsci’s definition of hegemony as

the capability of a state to lead the system of states itself in a desired direction—that is, to set the rules for the system in ways that buttress rather than undermine the world power of the hegemon. [. . .] (p. 365)

Here we should remember Gramsci’s point that intellectual and moral leadership (Machiavelli’s consent) is as critical to the effective exercise of hegemony internationally as coercion pure and simple is at the national level. Henk Overbeek ( 1994 ), however, emphasizes that hegemony in the global political economy has to do more with dominance of a class—specifically of the capitalist class.

Another important Gramscian term is “historical bloc,” which refers to the dynamic dialectical relationship between the material and productive base and the superstructure of ideas. As Robert W. Cox ( 1999 , p. 5) explains, “Gramsci was less concerned with the historic bloc as a stable entity than he was with historical mutations and transformations, and with the emancipatory potential for human agency in history.” In short, the relationship between civil society and the state within any historical bloc will embody both the existing hegemony and the seeds of counterhegemonies. “Civil society was the ground that sustained the hegemony of the bourgeoisie but also that on which an emancipatory counterhegemony could be constructed” (Cox, 1999 , p. 3).

Like Gramsci, Karl Polanyi ( 2001 ) saw society resisting the negative consequences of capitalist markets. In The Great Transformation , he argued that a “double-movement” resulted from social forces pushing back against the aspects of a market-driven society. Polanyi also saw the relationship between society, markets, and the state as historically situated, with technological and policy innovations leading to changes in society. Polanyi traced the creation of the self-regulating market economy through the commodification of land, labor, and specie, social changes that made the industrial revolution and the rise of “haute finance” possible.

Both Gramsci and Polanyi have influenced a cohort of critical IPE scholars, including Robert Cox ( 1996 ), Stephen Gill ( 2003 ; see also Gill & Mittelman, 1997 ), Craig Murphy ( 2005 ), James Mittelman ( 2004 ), and Mark Rupert ( 2000 ). Gramscian global political economy has been particularly relevant to the study of globalization and the spread of liberal markets around the world. These approaches to global political economy suggest that the existing tension in the world between the antiglobalizers and the proglobalizers has at root a dialectical contestation between hegemonic and counterhegemonic groups. These authors focus on the importance of groups and other nonstate actors, as well as states, since civil society within the global political economy includes a variety of types of actors.

The global financial crisis of 2008 provided the impetus for Marxian-influenced scholarship focusing on globalization. Marxian analyses of global financial crises differ from their liberal counterparts in emphasizing the structural nature of these periodic crises. That is, Marxian theorists tend to locate the tendency for economic crisis in the very nature of the system, as a necessary and (relatively) predictable feature, impossible to explain by reference to the individual decision-making of leaders and firms alone (Harvey, 2010 ; Krippner, 2011 ).The tensions between a liberal and a Marxian analysis of capitalism’s crisis tendencies are displayed in the substantive critique of the liberal approach in Crashed by Adam Tooze ( 2018 ; see Anderson, 2019 ). Some of this research, as discussed in the section “ Postcolonial Approaches ,” emphasizes the consequences of capitalist crises in postcolonial societies (e.g., Krishna, 2009 ).

Feminist Global Political Economy

Despite the differences among them, the three most common approaches to global political economy (liberal/neoliberal, mercantile/economic nationalist, and Marxian) tend to assume that the buying, selling, and production of goods and services are what matter. Important actors in the analysis, be they firms and consumers, states, or classes, are all engaged in buying and selling, producing goods and services for sale, and seeking wealth (Tickner, 1992 ). Feminist approaches to global political economy highlight two important points that are usually overlooked. First, people are gendered, and gender is generally understood hierarchically, with men and activities that are understood as masculine (competing, making money) being valued more highly than women and women’s activities. Second, productive (i.e., market-based) activities are not the only things that happen in society; rather, society needs, but, again, does not value as highly, the activities of the reproductive economy—the unpaid work necessary to create a home life, provide leisure activities, and care for family members. These reproductive activities are almost universally associated with feminine characteristics and are not considered by mainstream global political economy analyses. As V. Peterson ( 2005b ) argues, however, understanding the analytical implications of gendered hierarchies provides a more complete understanding of processes of the global political economy (see also Griffin, 2007 ). The approach by J. K. Gibson-Graham ( 2006 ) to decentering and reconceptualizing the capital-labor relation opens an analytical space for feminist theorizations of GPE along these lines.

The marketization of the global political economy, including the integration of emerging market economies, also has important gender implications. As some scholars note, these changes are not necessarily simply good or bad. On the negative side, the informalization of labor—the changing nature of available jobs from regular, full-time employment to part-time, temporary, or independent contracting arrangements—adds significant uncertainty to households’ economic stability. The effect is more pronounced on women’s work and on the feminized jobs held by men. On the positive side, globalization has also brought increasing equity in educational opportunities and increased access to some jobs (Benería, Floro, Grown, & MacDonald, 2000 ; Peterson, 2005b ). Similarly, Jacqui True, in a case study of the Czech Republic, finds that “the commodification of gender is facilitating the extension of markets,” with the dual effect of “empower[ing] women as much as it subjects them to new forms of discipline and market civilization” (True, 1999 , p. 363).

Consequently, a further contribution of feminist GPE has been to challenge the pervasive association of the study of the global or the totality with a masculine drive to dominance. Instead of combatting the impulse to study the global by turning to a study of microrelations, feminist GPE has developed theories and methods for understanding gender as a mechanism of producing and rationalizing the inequalities within global capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2017 ; Fraser, 2013 ; Tepe-Belfrage, 2016 ). Hozic and True ( 2016 ) bring together a variety of feminist and queer perspectives on global financial crisis, highlighting how these concerns cannot be consigned to the margins of the study of global economic processes.

Postcolonial Approaches

A burgeoning literature in postcolonial political economy has emerged through critical conversation with traditional IPE. This literature mobilizes a critique of Eurocentrism in political economy and foregrounds the structural impact that colonial histories continue to exert on global economic life (Dirlik, 1994 ; Grovogui, 2011 ; Lowe, 2015 ; Shilliam, 2018 ). Another key contribution of postcolonial theory to political economy has been its critique of Eurocentric epistemologies and its attention to the knowledge traditions and economic formations of the non-West (Agathangelou & Ling, 2003 ; Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010 ; Ling, 2000 ; Shilliam, 2012a , 2020 ). Robbie Shilliam ( 2009 , 2012b ), for example, theorizes about Atlantic slavery and its consequences for our understanding of liberal and Marxian IPE.

Debates continue over whether Marxian theory is essential to a postcolonial project of emancipation and self-determination (Rao, 2017 ). On the one hand, the reading of Marx by Dipesh Chakrabarty ( 2008 ) has inspired new possibilities for the critique of the coloniality and the racism of capitalism’s history and present (e.g., Persaud & Sajed, 2018 ; Tilley & Shilliam, 2018 ). On the other hand, Hobson ( 2012 , 2013a , 2013b ) argues that Marx and Lenin’s theoretical edifice is too indebted to a colonial worldview in which the West represents the model of future progress and social development. An influential Marxian critique of postcolonial studies can be found in Chibber ( 2013 ). Notwithstanding these tensions, scholars continue to draw inspiration from both postcolonial theory and Marxian theory to construct critiques of contemporary global capitalism. For example, Anievas and Nişancıoğlu ( 2015 ) have brought the sensibilities of the Marxian tradition together with postcolonial theory to highlight the irreducibly global or intersocietal history of capitalism, and Khalili ( 2020 ) takes stock of the colonial echoes that resonate within global trade flows from the standpoint of the Arabian Peninsula.

Upon entering the third decade of the 21st century , three rapidly evolving areas of scholarship, discussed briefly in this section, are likely to continue to be of interest and grow in importance: China and the transition of the neoliberal world order, queer global political economy, and “precarity” of the global workforce.

Prior to the 1990s, research on China generally focused on processes of development and modernization of a peripheral country. As China made initial changes to its economy and began to participate more in global trade, new questions emerged. Jacobson and Okensenberg ( 1990 ), for example, examined the impact of the participation of China, a developing country with a command economy, in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (it had been a member since 1980 ) and the likely consequences for the global economic order of its signing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. At the end of the 20th century , China’s economy underwent a major transformation, including the growth of its private sector, reliance on exports, and full engagement with international trade and finance. These changes spurred assessment of the IPE implications of China as a rising power. This research is consistent with mainstream IPE schools of thought, framing China’s opening and market reforms in terms of realist/economic nationalist expectations of conflict between China and the liberal capitalist countries (Layne, 2018 ) or liberal expectations that China will end up conforming to Western liberal capitalist norms (Deudney & Ikenberry, 2018 ; Ikenberry, 2009 ).

The new trend in the research moves away from this “binary orthodoxy” (De Graaff, ten Brink, & Parmar, 2020 ). Instead, this trend provides empirical and theoretical analysis of how China reshapes but does not necessarily remake global capitalism—not overturning global capitalism and the neoliberal order but rather exerting influence on and shaping its contours (Hung, 2009 , 2015 ). This stream of research avoids theorizing China as a unitary actor and instead looks closely at the global consequences of how the Chinese economy is organized domestically and in the global context. Hung ( 2008 ) assesses the overaccumulation of capital in China resulting from the state’s decentralization of regulatory authority, local actors’ overinvestment in productive capacity, and widespread underconsumption. China has been able to maintain strong growth and an export-driven trade policy in this unstable circumstance only because of overconsumption and debt in the United States. Other scholars have explored how China’s trade policy is both influenced by and promoted by transnational networks that Chinese elites have entered (de Graaff, 2020 ; Huo & Parmar, 2020 ). Disruption of neoliberal globalization is another important theme. For example, Hopewell ( 2016 ) argues that Chinese inconsistency—sometimes supporting and sometimes contesting neoliberal rules—is the root of its disruptiveness. Ironically, by supporting liberal rules, China shines a light on the “hypocrisy” of illiberal trade policies of the United States and other Western countries. Weinhardt and ten Brink ( 2020 ) suggest that explanation for this inconsistency can be found in domestic differences in the structure and degree of government intervention in sectors. McNally ( 2020 ) identifies the source of instability in the contradictions of Sino-capitalism, described as both neoliberal and neostatist and as organized top-down by the state and bottom-up through networks of entrepreneurs.

The second trend, queer global political economy, can be seen within the broader category of queer international relations (IR) theory (Weber, 2015 ), while overlapping substantially with feminist and other critical approaches. Queer IR theory uncovers and problematizes the political consequences of assumptions, grounded in naturalized cultural practices, of binary constructions of identity—of assuming the world is divided into male and female or similarly into normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or other taken-for-granted dichotomies. Applied to the substantive domain of global political economy, this approach focuses attention on “heteromasculine and cissexist assumptions and biases” and “the differential—and productive—impact of processes and policies associated with neoliberal globalization sexualized and gendered subjects, practices, and kinship relations” (see article “Queer International Relations”). Peterson ( 2014 ), for example, explores “global householding,” a term that encompasses the many transborder processes of social reproduction necessary to sustain families and the wider society, especially in the Global North. These processes include “marriage/partnership, earning income, managing daily life, securing childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and education, acquiring domestic ‘help,’ relocating for retirement” (p. 606). Smith ( 2016 ) investigates how neoliberal policy responses to global financial crises disadvantage those whose lives differ from that of the presumed “normal” family, a husband and a wife and their children. “Imaginaries” of the family, she argues, reproduce the neoliberal economic order.

The growing “precarity” of the global workforce, the subject of the third new direction of research discussed here, has emerged as a grave side effect of the processes of globalization, a reality acknowledged by all the different schools of IPE. Guy Standing ( 2016 ) has introduced and popularized the concept of the “precariat,” which he regards as a new stratum of the working class marked by an extreme lack of job security and basic benefits like healthcare and paid time off. This class, according to Standing, represents a growing contingent of the global workforce, a verdict corroborated by many empirical studies, especially from a comparative political economy perspective (Agarwala, 2013 ; Kalleburg, 2018 ; Mosoetsa, Stillerman, & Till, 2016 ). This framing of the issue of precarious labor, however, is not without its critics. With a properly global analytic lens, some argue, precarity does not appear to be a new phenomenon at all but a condition that has characterized the Global South since its inception and which now threatens the North as well (Scully, 2016 ). Moreover, as Ritu Vij ( 2019 , p. 504) has argued, the idea of precarity as it is popularly conceived rests on “the pathologization of vulnerability,” an ideological process which normalizes a liberal individualist political economy and understands nonliberal forms of life as “abject.”

It is also worth mentioning a trend that seems to have petered out. At the time the original 2010 version of this article was drafted, communitarianism seemed to be a promising, emerging stream of normative research that would address problems of global capitalism. Largely associated with the work of Amitai Etzioni ( 1991 , 2004 ), communitarianism can be seen as a countertheory to the idea that liberal markets are natural and that men and women are naturally economically rational, self-interested agents. Etzioni’s communitarianism does not eschew liberal economics wholly, nor does he advocate a loss of individual freedoms; instead, he looks for a via media in which the interests of individuals are balanced by the interest of the communities of which they are a part. The local, national, and global political economies are in essence communities. The connection to community seems to draw on the feminist idea of an ethic of care (Tronto, 1987 ). William Galston ( 2002 ), in a similar vein, argues for a rejection of both socialist and laissez-faire economics in favor of an approach that he calls “mutualism”; the policy implementation would be a “progressive market strategy,” in which policies would promote “moderate self-interest, regard for others, and internalized norms” of responsibility. Communitarian global political economy, however, failed to gain traction, perhaps because other, more normatively progressive critical approaches came to the fore.

GPE Research Relevant to COVID-19

As this article was being prepared for publication ( May 2020 ), it became difficult to ignore the severe implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the global political economy. The robust literature dealing with the global history of pandemics and the dangers that a new pandemic would pose in a world marked by increasingly intensifying processes of economic globalization are highlighted here.

A review of GPE’s engagements with the history of global pandemics reveals a wide variety of analytical lenses, including descriptive accounts of the impact of environment on society and more politically focused accounts of the differential impacts suffered by different peoples. The account by McNeil ( 1998 ) of the history of plagues is notable for its emphasis on intersocietal transmission, highlighting how the world’s peoples have been interconnected long before the emergence of 20th-century globalization. The work of Pirages ( 1995 , 1997 , 2007 ) deserves special mention for its wide historical and geographical scope and its sensitivity to the intersections between international politics, infectious disease transmission, and the coordinated social responses (or lack thereof) that have been implemented historically to combat the worst consequences of infectious disease. Work by Paul Farmer ( 2004 ) seeks to highlight how the social toll of pandemics largely depends on preexisting power relations and inequalities in society, which he theorizes in terms of “structural violence.” Another key scholar of pandemics is Mike Davis ( 2005 ), whose study on the Avian Flu offered a prescient warning of the political–economic threat of a new global pandemic. Davis ( 2020 ) has published an analysis of COVID-19 in a periodical issue focused on the pandemic (NLR Editors, 2020 ).

A special issue of Review of International Political Economy on Political Economies of Global Health, edited by Susan K. Sell and Owain D. Williams ( 2020b ), appeared online just a few months before the first reported cases of COVID-19. The issue focuses on global capitalism’s effects on the health of the world’s people across multiple scales and through multiple processes. Neoliberalism and policies insisting on free markets, Sell and Williams ( 2020a ) argue, have negative effects on global health through “regimes and institutions in areas such as trade and investment policy, austerity programs, pharmaceutical and food governance, and the rules that support globalized production and consumption” (p. 1). Though this observation focuses on health more generally, the global, national, and local responses to pandemics are certainly a part of the larger global health system. Three of the articles are especially relevant to the GPE aspects of pandemics and other instances of the spread of infectious disease. Rebecca J. Hester and Owain D. Williams ( 2020 ) ground their exploration of the political economy of the “somatic-security industrial complex,” upon influenza and its movement around the world. Stefan Elbe and Christopher Long ( 2020 ) explore global assemblages of medical molecules that become valuable for biodefense against disease outbreaks, bioterrorist attacks, and the like. João Nunes ( 2020 ) examines Brazil’s domestic political economy within the neoliberal order, the precarity of health workers’ jobs, and the consequences for Brazil during the Zika virus outbreak.

Much of the salient research on the global politics of infectious diseases prior to COVID-19 has occurred in fields of global health governance (Huang, 2014 ; Youde, 2018 ) and security studies (Davies, 2008 ; Price-Smith, 2009 ), and these studies will likely prove essential for future pandemic-related knowledge production in GPE. New materialist approaches that privilege the impact of nonhuman life processes will likely contribute in important ways to pandemic research (White, 2015 ).

Though COVID-19 was only recognized as a global pandemic in March 2020 , the sheer scope of the crisis resulted in immediate scholarly attention. Notable analyses of the pandemic and its reverberations in the global economy include the world-systems approach of Silver and Payne ( 2020 ) and a short but generative series of contributions to the journal of Foreign Policy (Walt et al., 2020 ). Certainly, many scholars of GPE will be turning to these contributions and constructing their own in responses to the global crisis of COVID-19.

Links to Digital Materials

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International Political Economy

  • Yuhki Tajima , Field Chair
  • Mitch Kaneda , Curricular Dean

Please see the SFS Bulletin for all major requirements .

The International Political Economy (IPEC) major investigates the rich intersection between economics and politics in the global environment. It typically goes beyond the constituent disciplines by combining traditional economic concerns about efficiency with traditional political concerns regarding distributional issues and legitimacy in market and non-market environments. The resulting combination of insights provides a means of better understanding complex interactions at the local, national and international levels.

The special character of international political economy derives in part from the methodological and substantive overlaps between the traditional disciplines of economics and political science. Methodologically, political economy combines formal modeling, comparative methods, and statistical techniques to analyze and evaluate competing theories of economic and political phenomena. In addition to using methods standard in the constituent disciplines, political economy has pioneered in developing new tools for the study of collective action in the presence of conflicting private interests.

Substantively, International Political Economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas, e.g., legislation, elections, government regulation, and policy formation in response to international phenomena; unilateral and multilateral activities involving international trade, finance, aid, and natural resources; local and international growth, development, and income distribution; and the interaction between business, governments, and diplomacy. The scope of inquiry ranges from mature capitalist countries, to developing economies to nations making transitions to capitalist systems. In all cases, the focus is on issues that cannot be properly understood without insights gained from both international economics and international politics.

Goals of the Major

The International Political Economy (IPEC) major is designed to provide students with the multi-disciplinary, methodologically rigorous tools needed to understand and analyze the interaction between political and economic forces around the world. These tools, as well as the substantive knowledge gained, will serve students who pursue graduate work, or careers in the private, public, or non-profit sector, international or non-governmental organizations. The IPEC major derives in part from the overlap between economics and political science, and the substantive knowledge gained by students in the IPEC major will partly reflect this. But the IPEC major also goes beyond these constituent disciplines and will provide students with knowledge of a variety of areas, including but not limited to the problems of globalization, the processes of economic development and reform, and the role of political power in economic policymaking.

Students will acquire both analytical tools and substantive expertise through unique core courses as well as through foundational courses from International Economics and International Politics on economic theory, econometrics, and international political economy. Students will also gain further expertise on specific areas by specializing in subsequent courses. All students, finally, will apply analytical tools to a particular topic of interest by writing a senior thesis.

Objectives of the Major

Substantively, International Political Economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas. The scope of inquiry ranges from mature capitalist countries, to developing economies to nations making transitions to capitalist systems. In all cases, the focus is on issues that cannot be properly understood without insights gained from both international economics and international politics. This requires an understanding of the methods and principal issues animating the areas in which these fields intersect.

To do this, students will learn:

  • Quantitative and qualitative methods to make causal inferences regarding political-economic phenomena
  • The ways in which states and state-institutions help or hinder economic prosperity How collective action in the presence of conflicting private interests can shape legislation, elections, and policy
  • The nature of unilateral and multilateral factors shaping international trade, finance, and aid.
  • Original research and writing that identifies a puzzle, derives testable hypotheses, selects appropriate methodologies, gathers empirical evidence, and offers conclusions.

Writing in the Major

Students majoring International Political Economy learn how to apply analytical tools to a particular topic of interest by writing a senior thesis and how to produce original research and writing that identifies a puzzle, derives testable hypotheses, selects appropriate methodologies, gathers empirical evidence, and offers conclusions.

IPEC majors are introduced to analytical tools and theories through the following required classes:

  • ECON 101 Intermediate Microeconomics
  • ECON 121 Economic Statistics
  • ECON 122 Intro to Econometrics
  • GOVT 261 International Political Economy
  • PECO 201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy

Students are exposed to research topics and research methods through reading of academic papers and conducting their own research projects presented in courses such as:

  • IPEC 312 Research Topics in International Political Economy
  • IPEC 328 Political Economy of Inequality and Distribution
  • IPEC 332 Political Economy of Institutions and Development
  • IPEC 250 IPE Quantitative Research Lab
  • INAF 383 Applied Econometrics for Development: Stata Practicum
  • ECON 484 Political Economy of Trade Policy

Finally, students are trained to produce original research and writing conducted in the mandatory capstone course:

  • IPEC 401 Senior Capstone Seminar

Honors in the Major

Students can earn Honors in the IPEC Major by submitting a letter of intent during the junior year, writing an honors quality thesis based on original research during the senior year, earning an A grade in the Senior Seminar, earning a major GPA of at least 3.67, and earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5.

IPEC Requirements

IPEC majors must satisfy the following requirements.

All students must demonstrate proficiency in mathematics by one of three means: Passing MATH-035 Calculus I with a score of 4 or higher in AP Calculus, or passing the Math Department Calculus I waiver test.

The Mathematics Department waiver test is an option suitable for students who studied calculus in high school but did not have the opportunity to take the AP exam. It is administered during the New Student Orientation period just before the beginning of the fall semester. Note that calculus is a prerequisite for Intermediate Microeconomics and Economic Statistics.

It is recommended that students satisfy the calculus requirement before the beginning of the sophomore year.

Requirements for the Class of 2022 and Beyond

  • Prerequisite: Calculus I or equivalent
  • Corequisite: GOVT-040 Comparative Political Systems
  • Corequisite: GOVT-060 International Relations
  • Corequisite: ECON-243 International Trade
  • Corequisite: ECON-244 International Finance
  • ECON-101 Intermediate Microeconomics
  • ECON-121 Economic Statistics
  • ECON-122 Introduction to Econometrics
  • GOVT-261 International Political Economy, GOVT-262 International Organization, GOVT-267 International Trade Law, or GOVT-268 Political Economy of Development
  • PECO-201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy or ECON-459 Game Theory
  • Two IPEC Core or Supporting courses, at least one of which must be IPEC Core
  • IPEC-401 Senior Thesis Seminar*

*Students who are not pursuing Honors in the IPEC major will be able to choose between the following: Option I: Taking IPEC 401 and writing a thesis in it. Option II: Taking an additional IPEC Core category course to substitute IPEC 401, and submitting a research paper written in a 300 or 400-level course that can count for the major. Notes: (a) IPEC 401 is required for all students seeking Honors in the IPEC major and remains open to all students in the major. (b) For Option II, you cannot double-count a single IPEC Core course to satisfy both the capstone requirement and an IPEC Core requirement. (c) For Option II, the research paper is to be submitted electronically to Dean Kaneda before the last day of the semester’s classes (not the last day of exams) if you are graduating in May or December, and before the last day of the second summer session’s classes if you are graduating in August. (d) For Option II, the research paper can be from any of the 300 or 400-level courses that are attributed as IPEC Core or IPEC Supporting category courses. Not all IPEC Core/Supporting courses have a research paper requirement. (e) For Option II, the research paper is expected to analyze a theoretical or empirical puzzle relevant to IPEC. It must be a completed and conclusive paper, and not a research proposal. The student must have earned a passing grade for the course in which the research paper was written.

Requirements Up to and Including the Class of 2021

The following 4 preparatory courses. These courses should be taken before senior year.

  • ECON 122 Introduction to Econometrics

ECON 101 should be completed during sophomore year since it is a pre-requisite for PECO 201. ECON 121 should be completed by the first semester of junior year since it is a pre-requisite for ECON 122. GOVT 261 targets sophomores and juniors. It is offered once a year, in either of the semesters. Students going abroad in the junior year should look into taking GOVT 261 in the sophomore year, as long as GOVT 060 International Relations has been completed.

Two Interdisciplinary Courses in Political Economy.

  • PECO 201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy (offered every fall)
  • IPEC 401 Senior Seminar in Political Economy (offered every spring)*

PECO 201 is ideally completed during junior year. IPEC 401 must be completed at Georgetown.

  • Four courses from the IPEC Core and IPEC Supporting course lists, at least two of which must be IPEC Core courses.

*Students who are not pursuing Honors in the IPEC major will be able to choose between the following: Option I: Taking IPEC 401 and writing a thesis in it. Option II: Taking an additional IPEC Core category course to substitute IPEC 401, and submitting a research paper written in a 300 or 400-level course that can count for the major. Notes: (a) IPEC 401 is required for all students seeking Honors in the IPEC major and remains open to all students in the major. (b) For Option II, you cannot double-count a single IPEC Core course to satisfy both the capstone requirement and an IPEC Core requirement. (c) For Option II, the research paper is to be submitted electronically to Dean Kaneda before the last day of the semester’s classes (not the last day of exams) if you are graduating in May or December, and before the last day of the second summer session’s classes if you are graduating in August. (d) For Option II, the research paper can be from any of the 300 or 400-level courses that are attributed as IPEC Core or IPEC Supporting category courses. Not all IPEC Core/Supporting courses have a research paper requirement. (e) For Option II, the research paper is expected to analyze a theoretical or empirical puzzle relevant to IPEC. It must be a completed and conclusive paper and not a research proposal. The student must have earned a passing grade for the course in which the research paper was written.

SEQUENCING IPEC majors urged to have fulfilled the Calculus I prerequisite (course, advanced credits, or waiver test) before the sophomore year. ECON 101 Intermediate Microeconomics and ECON 121 Economic Statistics are best taken during the sophomore year. You can consult the curricular dean for individualized planning.

QUANTITATIVE METHODS Analyzing data, whether to test hypotheses or to summarize trends, is an important part of studying international political economy. As a result, all majors are required to take statistics and econometrics and are encouraged to do so as early as possible, preferably no later than the end of their junior year. (Statistics and econometrics are essential in writing the senior thesis in IPEC-401.)

December Graduates: Some students who have accumulated sufficient credits elect to graduate early. To do so, students need to plan ahead, especially if honors in IPEC is to be pursued. All IPEC Honors candidates must take the senior seminar, IPEC-401, which is offered only in the spring semester.

IPEC Course Lists:

The list of IPEC core and IPEC core and supporting courses can be searched for in the Registrar’s Schedule of Classes for each semester by selecting all for “Subject” and selecting SFS/IPEC Core Courses or SFS/IPEC Supporting Courses for “Attribute Type.”

Study Abroad

A substantial fraction of students choose to spend part or all of the junior year abroad. Although studying abroad has clear benefits, it also has costs. A successful balancing of these costs and benefits requires advanced planning. PECO-201 is offered in the fall semester. As this course builds a foundation that will be used in later courses, it is best to take it before the senior year. Students spending one semester abroad should consider the spring rather than the fall semester. Those spending a year abroad should consult with the field chair and the curricular dean.

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  • Autumn 2017

POL S 586 A: Topics In International Political Economy

Prof. Aseem Prakash

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This thesis contains three independent research papers on political economy of development with a unified focus on leadership and decision makings within real world environments. The first chapter deals with country-cross experience using authoritarian turnovers, defined as a transition within nondemocratic regimes, as natural experiments. The final two chapters consists of China-based papers within contemporary historical context, i.e., the period since China’s reform and opening in the late 70s. The second chapter investigates the wealth creation and accumulating class, pinned down by global billionaires, people who have estimated wealth exceeding 1 billion U.S dollars based on Forbes’ database. The final chapter considers a critical theoretical along with a political struggle between two competing views on the interplay between market economy and socialism in the mid 80s. Using Deng Xiaoping’s southern talk in 1992 as an ending mark of that grand debate over the future institutional course of China, the third chapter seeks to provide a descriptive study on the effect of political shock on the social composition of super rich class in China, utilizing a database compiled from Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS). Chapter 1, Does Authoritarian Turnover Deliver, using authoritarian turnovers (ATs) as natural experiments, investigates the institutional transition effects from one nondemocratic regimes to another. I ask the following question: does authoritarian turnover produce on average positive growth effects? Using this exercise, I attempt to provide another test on the nexus between democratization and growth. An emerging idea from this research is that authoritarian turnover is as likely to happen as a transition into democracy. To determine this, a new panel dataset from authoritarian regimes 7 between 1950 and 2014 was constructed. My estimates suggest that those authoritarian turnovers have an adverse small average growth effect. This implies that by failing to take into account authoritarian turnovers, democratization literature might have underestimated the effect of transition into democracy. From a decomposition analysis, it is determined that transitions into party regimes can once in a while deliver better outcomes than transitions into other authoritarian systems. In general, however, the transition to party regimes on average cannot deliver a better growth outcome than democratization. Chapter 2, Becoming Global Billionaires from Mainland China: Theory and Evidence, studies the the set of billionaires from mainland China, discusses how their social origins affect their financing patterns. Guided by a proposed conceptual framework relating socio-political backgrounds of the billionaire entrepreneurs to their observable financing decisions, I show, under conditions of an open economy, grassroots billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g., Jack Ma) could attenuate political economy as well as financial frictions via capital injections from foreign venture capitalists. Building a unique database, I find, using a human equation, that (i) the politically unconnected billionaire entrepreneurs financed by foreign venture capitalists are more likely to float their companies outside mainland China (mainly in Hong Kong and the U.S), use offshore financing vehicles, and enter into innovative sectors; and (ii) the politically connected global billionaire entrepreneurs, however, are strongly associated with a record of state-owned enterprise (SOE) restructuring. Chapter 3, Serving the People or the People’s Note: On the Political Economy of Talent Allocation, discusses the welfare-improving impact of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Talks, through better allocation of talents. An efficient allocation of talents through occupational choice is central to modern economic growth. Removal of developmental barriers unfavorable to entrepreneurship might be a plausible channel for China’s superb economic performance. Using a newly compiled data on China’s Super Rich Persons (CSRP), the regression kink (RK) design reports supportive evidence on the politically induced structural change in the social compositions of entrepreneurs using as an event shock from Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Talks: consistent with pro8 market talent allocation framework (i) the share of super-rich entrepreneur having state sector experience and party membership declines; (ii) the effects on the attributes of the parental father of the entrepreneurs are rather limited. In short, the three chapters as a whole contribute to a study of political economy of development using real world experiences. At the core of each of the chapter, the central theme of the paper is unified under the interactions between decision makings of leaders, whether they are political or business leaders, and institutional environments. In chapter 1, the average effect of authoritarian turnovers, which by definition are associated with replacement of leaders, could be interpreted as selection effects of leaders in that setting. In chapter 2, the minting of Chinese billionaires is more or less made possible by the institutional innovations offered by an open economy in which offshore vehicles and other sets of financial innovations are available. In chapter 3, the shaping of a wealth creation class could be attributable to a political resolution of competing ideals and plans in a unique historical setting.

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Home > Student Research and Creative Works > IPE_STUDENT > IPE Theses

International Political Economy Theses

Theses from 2021 2021.

Climate Migration and Human Security , Sam Meade

The CNN Effect and State Violence Against Muslim Ethnic Minorities , Sydni Resnick

Theses from 2020 2020

Remittances and Development: Local Empowerment and National Dependency , Abby Foy

Neoliberal Development: Capability Deprivation and Barriers for Positive Mental Health , Kate Roscher

The Past and the Present: Two Paradigms of the Sino-African Investment , Emma Weirich

Theses from 2019 2019

Demystifying Poverty in Tourism: Looking into Pro-Poor Tourism in India , Sara Burke

Public Authority and Private Prisons: How Private Prison Labor Contributes to National Employment Precarity , Kaitlyn Oder

Theses from 2018 2018

Chinese Government’s Inability to Use Film – One of the Most Powerful Cultural Tools of Soft Power Expansion – to Achieve Its Soft Power Expansion Goals: Lessons for China to Tackle Its Soft Power-Deficit Problem , Kyungin Kim

Strategic Puzzle in the South China Sea: Perception, Power, and Money. Chinese Plans for Hegemony? , Robert Kelly Stewart

Theses from 2017 2017

Behind Germany’s Willkommenskultur and Hungary’s Xenophobic Sentiments: Responses to the Syrian Refugee Crisis within the European Union , Mia Kelliher

Winning the Virtuous Battle, but Losing the War? The tradeoffs of humanitarian aid and its impact on human development , Sierra Miller

Theses from 2016 2016

Avoiding Turmoil: A Comparative Exploration of the ‘Resource Curse’ , Ian Latimer

Theses from 2015 2015

“There is No Difference:” Neoliberalism and Latin American (Police) State Legitimacy , Max Estevao

Intervention and Sectarian Conflict: Fear and Loathing in the Levant , Jacob Karson

Moral Sanctions With Immoral Impacts , Camille Sachs

Theses from 2014 2014

The persistence of the drug trade in Colombia: The political, social, and economic dimensions of new illicit business paradigms in Colombia , Tess Davis

Limited Trade and the CITES Ivory Trade Ban: Sustainable Use As a Viable Means of Conservation , Nina Forbes

Compatibility Between Business and the Environment: Examples from a case study of Patagonia , Ellesha Gasperini

Theses from 2013 2013

Cause-Related Marketing: A Fantastic Fundraising Tool or a Corrupter of Philanthropy? , Taylor Beard

Imperfect Yet Indispensible Financial Integration , Jacob R. Snider B.A.

The Impact of Authoritarian Rule on the Success of Global City Branding Efforts: Dubai, Singapore, and Mumbai , Abigail Struxness

Theses from 2012 2012

Power in Networks: Considering Castells’ Network Society in Egypt’s January 25th Movement and America’s Occupy Wall Street Movement , Marina Balleria

Reinterpreting Nuclear Consequences: Realism, Constructivism, and the Iranian Crisis , Harrison Diamond

Un-Obtainium: The Quest for Rare Earth Elements , Brahm Heyman

Public and Private Firms in Natural Resource Industry: Comparing the Development of the Lithium Industry in South America , Mike Knape

Globalization, Health and the Nutrition Transition: How Global TNCs are Changing Local Food Consumption Patterns , Morgan McCloskey

China to the Rescue? The Implications of China’s Engagement with Resource-Rich Countries , Sean Rice

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Dissertations

The dv410 dissertation is a major component of the msc programme and an important part of the learning and development process involved in postgraduate education., research design and dissertation in international development.

The DV410 dissertation is a major component of the MSc programme and an important part of the learning and development process involved in postgraduate education. The objective of DV410  is to provide students with an overview of the resources available to them to research and write a 10,000 dissertation that is topical, original, scholarly, and substantial. DV410 will provide curated dissertation pathways through LSE LIFE and Methods courses, information sessions, ID-specific disciplinary teaching, topical seminars and dissertation worksops in ST. With this in mind, students will be able to design their own training pathway and set their own learning objectives in relation to their specific needs for their dissertation. From the Autumn Term (AT) through to Summer Term (ST), students will discuss and develop their ideas in consultation with their mentor or other members of the ID department staff and have access to a range of learning resources (via DV410 Moodle page) to support and develop their individual projects from within the department and across the LSE. 

Prizewinning dissertations

The archive of prizewinning dissertations showcases the best MSc dissertations from previous years. These offer a useful guide to current students on how to prepare and write a high calibre dissertation.

2022-OW (PDF) The Politics of Political Conditionality: How theEU Is Failing the Western Balkans Pim W.R.Oudejans Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Management 

2022-GN (PDF) An Empirical Study of the Impact of Kenya’sFree Secondary Education Policy on Women’sEducation Nora Geiszl Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Management 

2022-JC  (PDF) Giving with one hand, taking with the other:the contradictory political economy of socialgrants in South Africa Jack Calland Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Studies

2022-GL (PDF) State Versus Market: The Case of Tobacco Consumption in Eastern European and Former Soviet Transition Economies Letizia Gazzaniga Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development

2022-ER (PDF) Reproductive injustice across forced migration trajectories: Evidence from female asylum-seekers fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle Emily Rice Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development

2022-LICB  (PDF) The effects of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) on child nutrition following an adverseweather shock: the case of Indonesia Liliana Itamar Carillo Barba Winner Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Health and International Development 2022-SC (PDF) Fiscal Responses to Conditional Debt Relief:the impact of multilateral debt cancellation on taxation patterns Sara Cucaro  Joint winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2022-RM  (PDF) Navigating humanitarian space(s) to provideprotection and assistance to internally displacedpersons: applying the concept of ahumanitarian ‘micro-space’ to the caseof Rukban in Syria Miranda Russell  Joint winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-CC  (PDF) International Remittances and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Investigating Resilient Remittance Flows from Italy during 2020 Carla Curreli Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance and Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Management 

2021-NB  (PDF) Reluctant respondents: Early settlement by developing countries during WTO disputes Nicholas Baxtar Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Management (Specialism: Applied Development)

2021-CD  (PDF) One Belt, Many Roads? A Comparison of Power Dynamics in Chinese Infrastructure Financing of Kenya and Angola Conor Dunwoody  Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Studies

2021-NN  (PDF) Tool for peace or tool for power? Interrogating Turkish ‘water diplomacy’ in the case of Northern Cyprus Nina Newhouse Winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Studies

2021-CW  (PDF) Exploring Legal Aid Provision for LGBTIQ+Asylum Seekers in the American Southwest from 2012-2021 Claire Wever Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-BP  (PDF) Instrumentalising Threat; An Expansion of Biopolitical Control Over Exiles in Calais During the COVID-19 Pandemic Bethany Plant Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-HS  (PDF) A New “Green Grab”? A Multi-Scalar Analysis of Exclusion in the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) Project, Kenya Helen Sticklet Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-GM  (PDF) Fuelling policy: The Role of Public Health Policy-Support Tools in Reducing Household Air Pollution as a Risk-Factor for Non-Communicable Diseases in LMICs Georgina Morris Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Health and International Development 

2021-LC  (PDF) How do women garment workers employ practices of everyday resistance to challenge the patriarchal gender order of Sri Lankan society? Lois Cooper Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development 

2020-LK  (PDF) Can international remittances mitigate negative effects of economic shocks on education? – The case of Nigeria Lara Kasperkovitz Best Overall Performance Best Dissertation Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergengies 

“Fallen through the Cracks” The Network for Childhood Pneumonia and Challenges in Global Health Governance  Eva Sigel Best Overall Performance Health and International Development 

2020-AB  (PDF) Fighting the ‘Forgotten’ Disease: LiST-Based Analysis of Pneumonia Prevention Interventions to Reduce Under-Five Mortality in High-Burden Countries Alexandra Bland Best Dissertation Prize  Health and International Development   

2020-TP  (PDF) Techno-optimism and misalignment: Investigating national policy discourses on the impact of ICT in educational settings in Sub-Saharan Africa Tao Platt Best Overall Performance Development Studies 

2020-HS  (PDF)  “We want land, all the rest is humbug”: land inheritance reform and intrahousehold dynamics in India Holly Scott Best Dissertation Prize Development Studies   

2020-PE  (PDF)  Decent Work for All? Waste Pickers’ Collective Action Frames after Formalisation in Bogotá, Colombia  Philip Edge Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management

2020-LC  (PDF)  Variation in Bilateral Investment Treaties: What Leads to More ‘Flexibility for Development’? Lindsey Cox Best Dissertation Prize Development Management

2019-GR (PDF) Political Economy of Industrial Policy: Analysinglongitudinal and crossnationalvariations in industrial policy in Brazil andArgentina Grace Reeve Best Overall Performance Development Studies 

2019-MM (PDF) The Securitisation of Development Projects: The Indian State’s Response to the Maoist Insurgency Monica Moses Best Dissertation Prize Development Studies 

2019-KM (PDF) At the End of Emergency: An Exploration of Factors Influencing Decision-making Surrounding Medical Humanitarian Exit Kaitlyn Macneil Best Overall Performance Prize Health and International Development

2019-KA (PDF) The Haitian Nutritional Paradox: Driving factors of the Double Burden of Malnutrition Khandys Agnant Best Dissertation Prize Health and International Development   

2019-NL (PDF) Women in the Rwandan Parliament: Exploring Descriptive and Substantive Representation Nicole London Best Dissertation Prize Development Management 

2019-CB (PDF) Post-conflict reintegration: the long-termeffects of abduction and displacement on theAcholi population of northern Uganda Charlotte Brown Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2019-NLeo (PDF) Making Fashion Sense: Can InternationalLabour Standards Improve Accountabilityin Globalised Fast Fashion? Nicole Leo Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2019-AS (PDF) Who Controls Whom? Evaluating theinvolvement of Development FinanceInstitutions (DFIs) in Build Own-Operate (BOO)Energy Projects in relation to Market Structures& Accountability Chains: The case of theBujagali Hydropower Project (BHPP) in Uganda Aya Salah Mostafa Ali Best Dissertation Prize African Development 

2019-NG (PDF) Addressing barriers to treatment-seekingbehaviour during the Ebola outbreak in SierraLeone: An International Response Perspective Natasha Glendening India Best Overall Performance Prize African Development 

2019-SYJ (PDF) The Traditional Global Care Chain and the Global Refugee Care Chain: A Comparative Analysis Sana Yasmine Johnson Best Dissertation Prize Best Overall Performance Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergengies 

2018-JR (PDF) Nudging, Teaching, or Coercing?: A Review of Conditionality Compliance Mechanisms on School Attendance Under Conditional Cash Transfer Programs Jonathan Rothwell Best Dissertation Prize African Development 

2018-LD (PDF) A Feminist Perspective On Burundi's Land Reform Ladd Serwat Best Overall Performance African Development 

2018-KL (PDF) Decentralisation: Road to Development or Bridge to Nowhere? Estimating the Effect of Devolution on Infrastructure Spending in Kenya Kurtis Lockhart  Best Dissertation Prize and Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2018-OS (PDF) From Accountability to Quality: Evaluating the Role of the State in Monitoring Low-Cost Private Schools in Uganda and Kenya Oceane Suquet Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2018-LN (PDF) Water to War: An Analysis of Drought, Water Scarcity and Social Mobilization in Syria Lian Najjar Best Dissertation Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2018-IS  (PDF) “As devastating as any war”?: Discursive trends and policy-making in aid to Central America’s Northern Triangle Isabella Shraiman  Best Overall Performance  International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2017-AR (PDF) Humanitarian Reform and the Localisation Agenda:Insights from Social Movement and Organisational Theory Alice Robinson Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2017-ACY (PDF) The Hidden Costs of a SuccessfulDevelopmental State:Prosperity and Paucity in Singapore Agnes Chew Yunquian Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Managament 

2017-HK  (PDF) Premature Deindustrialization and Stalled Development, the Fate of Countries Failing Structural Transformation? Helen Kirsch Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme Development Studies

2017-HZ  (PDF) ‘Bare Sexuality’ and its Effects onUnderstanding and Responding to IntimatePartner Sexual Violence in Goma, DemocraticRepublic of the Congo (DRC) Heather Zimmerman Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2017-KT  (PDF) Is Good Governance a Magic Bullet?Examining Good Governance Programmes in Myanmar Khine Thu Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme Development Managament 

2017-NL  (PDF) Persistent Patronage? The DownstreamElectoral Effects of Administrative Unit Creationin Uganda Nicholas Lyon  Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme African Development 

2016-MV  (PDF) Contract farming under competition: exploring the drivers of side selling among sugarcane farmers in Mumias             Milou Vanmulken  Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation                                                      Dev elopment Management                

2016-JS  (PDF) Resource Wealth and Democracy: Challenging the  Assumptions of the Redistributive Model              Janosz Schäfer  Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies                

2016-LK   (PDF) Shiny Happy People: A study of the effects income relative to a reference group exerts on life satisfaction             Lajos Kossuth Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance                                     Development Studies  

2015-MP (PDF) "Corruption by design" and the management of infrastructure in Brazil: Reflections on the Programa de Aceleração ao Crescimento - PAC.             Maria da Graça Ferraz de Almeida Prado                                                          Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation                                          Development Managment                                                                                  

2015-IE (PDF) Breaking Out Of the Middle-Income Trap: Assessing the Role of Structural Transformation.                                                                               Ipek Ergin                                                                                                   Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2015-AML (PDF) Labour Migration, Social Movements and Regional Integration: A Comparative Study of the Role of Labour Movements in the Social Transformation of the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community.             Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen                                                                                Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation                                   Development Management

2015-MM (PDF) Who Bears the Burden of Bribery? Evidence from Public Service Delivery in Kenya                     Michael Mbate                                                                                                   Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Management

2015-KK (PDF) Export Processing Zones as Productive Policy: Enclave Promotion or Developmental Asset? The Case of Ghana. Kilian Koffi Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation African Development

2015-GM (PDF) Forgive and Forget? Reconciliation and Memory in Post-Biafra Nigeria. Gemma Mehmed Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2015-AS (PDF) From Sinners to Saviours: How Non-State Armed Groups use service delivery to achieve domestic legitimacy. Anthony Sequeira Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2014-NS (PDF) Anti-Corruption Agencies: Why Do Some Succeed and Most Fail? A Quantitative Political Settlement Analysis. Nicolai Schulz Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

2014-MP (PDF) International Capital Flows and Sudden Stops: a global or a domestic issue? Momchil Petkov Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

2014-TC (PDF) Democracy to Decline: do democratic changes jeopardize economic growth? Thomas Coleman Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

2014-AK (PDF) Intercultural Bilingual Education: the role of participation in improving the quality of education among indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Anni Kasari Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Management

2014-EL (PDF) Treaty Shopping in International Investment Arbitration: how often has it occurred and how has it been perceived by tribunals? Eunjung Lee Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Management

2013-SB (PDF) Refining Oil - A Way Out of the Resource Curse? Simon Baur Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

2013-NI (PDF) The Rise of ‘Murky Protectionism’: Changing Patterns of Trade-Related Industrial Policies in Developing Countries: A case study of Indonesia. Nicholas Intscher Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Studies

2013-JF (PDF) Why Settle for Less? An Analysis of Settlement in WTO Disputes. Jillian Feirson Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2013-LH (PDF) Corporate Social Responsibility in Mining: The effects of external pressures and corporate leadership. Leah Henderson Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2013-BM (PDF) Estimating incumbency advantages in African politics: Regression discontinuity evidence from Zambian parliamentary and local government elections. Bobbie Macdonald Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP145 (PDF) Is History Repeating Itself? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Women in Climate Change Campaigns. Catherine Flanagan Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP144 (PDF) Disentangling the fall of a 'Dominant-Hegemonic Party Rule'. The case of Paraguay and its transition to a competitive electoral democracy. Dominica Zavala Zubizarreta Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP143 (PDF) Enabling Productive Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: Critical issues in policy design. Noor Iqbal Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP142 (PDF) Beyond 'fear of death': Strategies of coping with violence and insecurity - A case study of villages in Afghanistan. Angela Jorns Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP141 (PDF) What accounts for opposition party strength? Exploring party-society linkages in Zambia and Ghana. Anna Katharina Wolkenhauer Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP140 (PDF) Between Fear and Compassion: How Refugee Concerns Shape Responses to Humanitarian Emergencies - The case of Germany and Kosovo. Sebastian Sahla Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP139 (PDF) Worlds Apart? Health-seeking behaviour and strategic healthcare planning in Sierra Leone. Thea Tomison Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP138 (PDF) War by Other Means? An Analysis of the Contested Terrain of Transitional Justice Under the 'Victor's Peace' in Sri Lanka. Richard Gowing Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

WP137 (PDF) Social Welfare Policy - a Panacea for Peace? A Political Economy Analysis of the Role of Social Welfare Policy in Nepal's Conflict and Peace-building Process. Annie Julia Raavad Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP136 (PDF) Women and the Soft Sell: The Importance of Gender in Health Product Purchasing Decisions. Adam Alagiah Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP135 (PDF) Human vs. State Security: How can Security Sector Reforms contribute to State-Building? The case of the Afghan Police Reform. Florian Weigand Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP134 (PDF) Evaluating the Impact of Decentralisation on Educational Outcomes: The Peruvian Case. Siegrid Holler-Neyra Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Management

WP133 (PDF) Democracy and Public Good Provision: A Study of Spending Patterns in Health and Rural Development in Selected Indian States. Sreelakshmi Ramachandran Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP132 (PDF) Intellectual Property Rights and Technology Transfer to Developing Countries: a Reassessment of the Current Debate Marco Valenza Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP131 (PDF) Traditional or Transformational Development? A critical assessment of the potential contribution of resilience to water services in post-conflict Sub-Saharan Africa. Christopher Martin Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

WP128  (PDF) The demographic dividend in India: Gift or curse? A State level analysis on differeing age structure and its implications for India's economic growth prospects. Vasundhra Thakurd Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP127  (PDF) When Passion Dries Out, Reason Takes Control: A Temporal Study of Rebels' Motivation in Fighting Civil Wars. Thomas Tranekaer Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP126  (PDF) Micro-credit - More Lifebuoy than Ladder? Understanding the role of micro-credit in coping with risk in the context of the Andhra Pradesh crisis. Anita Kumar Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation Development Management

WP124 (PDF) Welfare Policies in Latin America: the transformation of workers into poor people. Anna Popova Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP123  (PDF) How Wide a Net? Targeting Volume and Composition in Capital Inflow Controls. Lucas Issacharoff Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP117 (PDF) Shadow Education: Quantitative and Qualitative analysis of the impact of the educational reform (implementation of centralized standardised testing). Nataliya Borodchuk Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP115 (PDF) Can School Decentralization Improve Learning? Autonomy, participation and student achievement in rural Pakistan. Anila Channa Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP114 (PDF) Good Estimation or Good Luck? Growth Accelerations revisited. Guo Xu Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP113 (PDF) Furthering Financial Literacy: Experimental evidence from a financial literacy program for Microfinance Clients in Bhopal, India. Anna Custers Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP112 (PDF) Consumption, Development and the Private Sector: A critical analysis of base of the pyramid (BoP) ventures. David Jackman Winner of the Prize for Best Disseration Development Management

WP106 (PDF) Reading Tea Leaves: The Impacy of Mainstreaming Fair Trade. Lindsey Bornhofft Moore Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP104 (PDF) Institutions Collide: A Study of "Caste-Based" Collective Criminality and Female Infanticide in India, 1789-1871. Maria Brun Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP102 (PDF) Democratic Pragmatism or Green Radicalism? A critical review of the relationship between Free, Prior and Informed Consent and Policymaking for Mining. Abbi Buxton Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP100 (PDF) Market-Led Agrarian Reform: A Beneficiary perspective of Cédula da Terra. Veronika Penciakova Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP98 (PDF) No Business like Slum Business? The Political Economy of the Continued Existence of Slums: A case study of Nairobi. Florence Dafe Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP97 (PDF) Power and Choice in International Trade: How power imbalances constrain the South's choices on free trade agreements, with a case study of Uruguay. Lily Ryan-Collins Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Dissertation Development Management

WP96 (PDF) Health Worker Motivation and the Role of Performance Based Finance Systems Africa: A Qualitative Study on Health Worker Motivation and the Rwandan Performance Based finance initiative in District Hospitals. Friederike Paul Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Dissertation Development Management

WP95 (PDF) Crisis in the Countryside: Farmer Suicides and the Political Economy of Agrarian Distress in India. Bala Posani Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP94 (PDF) From Rebels to Politicians. Explaining Rebel-to Party Transformations after Civil War: The case of Nepal. Dominik Klapdor Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP92 (PDF) Guarding the State or Protecting the Economy? The Economic factors of Pakistan's Military coups. Amina Ibrahim Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP91 (PDF) Man is the remedy of man: Constructions of Masculinity and Health-Related Behaviours among Young men in Dakar, Senegal. Sarah Helen Mathewson Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies

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Dissertation for msc political economy of development.

dissertation topics international political economy

Key information

Module overview.

Students are required to complete a 10,000-word dissertation in an approved topic in the political economy of development (100% of module mark). Students are encouraged to select topics appropriate to their specific programme and expertise within the Department more generally. Students are required to submit a proposed dissertation title, approved by a member of staff, during the second term.

The dissertation is completed during the summer under the supervision of a member of the Department. Supervisors are allocated by the Department based on approved topics and staff availability. Supervisors provide guidance on source material, hypothesis formulation, research methods and structure but will not read complete drafts.

Dissertations must be submitted in September. They are marked by two internal examiners (the supervisor and another member of the Department) and in some cases by an external examiner. Dissertations are assessed on the basis of presentation, structure, analytical depth and originality. Recent titles have included:

  • A study into the Determinants of Female Labour force participation in the Middle East
  • Asset-Backed Securitization: A Route to Financial Maturity in Emerging Markets?
  • Financial Sector Fragility and Macroeconomic Crisis
  • Testing the Tension: The Effect of Labour Market Institutions on Growth in the
  • Indian Textile Industry
  • India’s Sugar Sector: The Effects of Strong Regulation and the Prospects for the
  • Industry under Deregulation’
  • Bond Issuance for Development Finance: The Cases of International Finance Facility and Asian Bond Market Initiatives’
  • The Cost of Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Attaining the International Poverty Targets.
  • Implications for rural women of the World Bank’s market-assisted model for land reform: A South African case study.’
  • Banking Crisis: A Case Study of the Dabhol Power Company.
  • Political Economy of Aid and Consequences for Poverty Reduction.’
  • Does South Africa suffer from the ‘Fear of Float’ Syndrome? An Analysis of the Efficacy and Challenges of a Managed Floating Exchange Rate Regime with Financial Integration.
  • The Impact of Land Reform on Poverty in Zimbabwe
  • Class and Gender Perspectives of Labour Market Structure in India in the Post Reform Era
  • Food Security in China with Reference to the Issue of Land Confiscation
  • Examining the Relationship between AIDS and the Pressures of Social Welfare
  • Is Greed or Grievance at the Root of the Current Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
  • The Political Economy of Decentralisation on West Bengal
  • The Political Economy of Caribbean Integration: Prospects and Potential for the CSME in advancing regional development’
  • Global Financial Flows and Development Investments’
  • Bargaining for the OPEC Production Quota: A Game Theoretic Approach’
  • Class and gender Perspective of Labour Market Structure in India in the Post Reform Era’
  • The Role of Learning Rents in Industrial Policy: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Egypt and Korea’

Objectives and learning outcomes of the module

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

  • Demonstrate their substantial understanding of a key issue, topic or theme relating to the political economy of development.
  • Organize their ideas in response to theoretical and empirical material and plan, develop and present a written argument in relation to this.
  • Show their ability to effectively gather, manage, synthesize and employ relevant data in support of their written argument.
  • Demonstrate their capacity to work independently under the guidance of an academic supervisor.
  • Show that they have followed good academic research practice and have achieved a good level of competence in academic writing.

Important notice regarding changes to programmes and modules

In this section

  • International

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University of Aberdeen

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International Political Economy, MSc

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International Political Economy

Introduction.

Do you want to understand the sources of stability and change in the global economic order?

International Political Economy prepares you to understand the structures, hierarchies, and power dynamics that regulate finance and trade, drive globalisation and economic nationalisms, and impact the distribution of wealth and poverty across and within states, regions, and the world.

This course has both January and September start dates. Apply Now

Eligible self-funded international Masters students will receive the Aberdeen Global Scholarship. Visit our Funding Database to find out more.

Study Information

Study options.

  • The programme in International Political Economy introduces students to the conceptual and theoretical terrain of IPE with a particular focus on dimensions of globalization that have re-shaped international flows of capital, goods, and labour.
  • Among the topics covered are neoliberalism, international trade, financialization, gender, poverty and inequality, development, post-development and the rise of economic nationalism.
  • The aim of the programme is to provide students with a rigorous academic grounding in the scholarly debates about key substantive issues and the relation between theory and policymaking, with a view to preparing graduates for further studies in IPE or as practitioners and policy-makers in the private and public sectors.

Programme Fees

Duration: 12 months full-time or 24 months part-time (MLitt); 9 months full-time or 18 months part-time (PGDip); 4 months full time of 8 months part time (PgCert).

Information for part-time students: This route runs over two years. Students can take up to 120 credits per year. IR5905 must be taken in year 2. The following courses are compulsory and can be taken in year 1 or 2:

  • IR5007 and SO5512
  • 30 credits of courses from the following options: BU5053, IR5001, PI5025, PI5027, SL5011
  • One of the following courses: PI5521, PI5518, PI5520, or SL5513

Compulsory Courses

30 Credit Points

Introduces students to the key theories and themes in the disciplinary study of International Political Economy. Topics covered include global inequality and wealth distribution; financialization and crisis; precarization of work; global regulation of trade, labour, and money; gender, and the environment in the international political economy.

This course, which is prescribed for all taught postgraduate students, is studied entirely online, takes approximately 5-6 hours to complete and can be taken in one sitting, or spread across a number of weeks.

Topics include orientation overview, equality and diversity, health, safety and cyber security and how to make the most of your time at university in relation to careers and employability.

Successful completion of this course will be recorded on your Enhanced Transcript as ‘Achieved’.

Optional Courses

Candidates will select 30 credits from the following electives:

This course lays the foundations for, explores, and critically analyses the main theoretical paradigms and debates in International Relations, and engages with the complexity of debates on concepts in IR. The theoretical topics to be covered include debates on the international system, cooperation, world order, conflict, development, representation and identity. Students will also be introduced to some of the main debates in epistemology and methodology that apply to the discipline.

15 Credit Points

History and politics of energy since WW2. Nuclear Power politics – rise, fall and non-rise?. Renewable energy politics, rise and stagnation or triumph? EU politics of liberalisation and interventions such as the EU ETS. Environmental politics and oil; conserving nature and extracting oil Arguments about regulations on oil and gas, planning arguments, arguments about oil spills, protests (eg Brent Spar). The politics of natural gas. The case of ‘fracking’. The course will discuss how economics and politics interact. No prior technical or econometric knowledge is required for this course.

Since the end of the Cold War the world has seen a resurgence of religious movements in the public sphere and, particularly since 9/11, religion has increasingly been viewed in policy debates as an issue of domestic and international security. In the ever increasingly globalized era, religious identifications criss-cross national boundaries and identities posing a dilemma for the established norms of the secular nation-state, political theory and actors. This course will examine some of the emerging theories associated with the rise of political religion, and the potential for conflict and peace that emerge. Utilizing diverse case studies ranging from religious Zionism, to political Islam to national Hindu movements the course will critique and employ contemporary theoretical frameworks to gain understanding of the current phenomena of religion in the international political domain.

This course introduces key techniques from economics and finance to allowing understanding of the basics of business decision making within the energy industries and the economic implications of key energy policies. We consider basic financial concepts such as: present value, the opportunity cost of capital and their role in business decision making in energy industries. We also consider key economic elements of markets and how the economic environment structures the way in which businesses make decisions and energy market outcomes.

Qualitative Sociology: Philosophy and Methods: This course introduces students to a range of methods used in qualitative social science research (such as participant observation, qualitative interviewing, focus groups, diaries, photography and film, and archived data sources). The emphasis will be on the research process, from project design to analysis and presentation, with methodological issues raised in the context of researchable questions. Issues of reliability, representativeness and validity, and the potential for combining methods will be addressed. Students use the course work to develop their research interests and reflect on their research practices.

Only candidates who complete the programme at the appropriate standard will be allowed to progress to Stage 3. Candidates who fail to achieve the standard for progression to, or who elect not to proceed to Stage 3, shall be awarded a Postgraduate Diploma if they have achieved the appropriate number of credits for that award. Candidates for the Postgraduate Certificate must achieve 60 credits from the first semester courses.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on substantive dimensions of globalization by considering recent changes occurring in the economic, political, social, and cultural realms of society. These themes are analysed by considering recent empirical studies, which seek to clarify our theoretical understanding of globalization through advanced social scientific research. The substantive themes covered include global capitalism, the global division of labour, global governance, the changing role of the nation state, transnational social change, and cultural homogenization and heterogenization. Interconnections between these aspects of globalization are highlighted.

One course from the following:

Oil and Security – how oil crises have occurred since 1973, with a focus on the energy demand and supply pressures and the political factors triggering the 1973 and 1979 oil crises. OPEC and IEA. The factors underpinning the oil crisis of 2008 and its relationships to world economic crisis. The role of China in oil politics.

Natural Gas, the EU and Russia. How conceptions of (natural gas) energy security are constructed and implemented in the EU and Russia –Nuclear Power and energy security;– eg Iran .

Climate Security

This course familiarises students with quantitative research techniques commonly used in the social sciences. It begins by covering the basic concepts underlying quantitative methods and the fundamental statistical techniques used for analysing relationships between two variables. The main part of the course focuses on multiple regression analysis, perhaps the most widely used technique in quantitative social science research. Students gain practical knowledge by undertaking two research reports to assess a substantive topic of their choosing.

The focus of this module is the key approaches, institutions, and contemporary issues in global security relating to the rise of China. Set in the context of broader global security issues, this module offers students an introduction to Chinese security policy and approaches to international relations. It lifts the vale on a very misunderstood, controversial, and increasingly critical feature of global security and world affairs. It will explore debates on China's rise, China's growing involvement in international politics, and global security.

International terrorism and counterterrorism dominate both contemporary scholarly debates in International Relations (IR) and policy discussions. This course examines these debates by focusing, on the one hand, on the (individual and/or structural) causes and different manifestations of terrorism and, on the other hand, on debates on how to respond to terrorism not only effectively but also without violating humanitarian principles and international law. Overall, the course aims to provide students with an overview of current research on international terrorism and counterterrorism in IR and its neighbouring disciplines and to enable them to develop an in-depth knowledge and understanding of core aspects of the issue.

60 Credit Points

​The dissertation in IPE enables students to develop in-depth knowledge of a topic of interest. Under close supervision by an expert on the topic selected, students have an opportunity to frame, develop, research and write a substantive and original thesis on a topic of their choosing.

Information for part-time students: This route will run over two years. Students can take up to 120 credit points in a single year. PD5506 must be taken in Year 1. IR5905 must be taken in Year 2. The following courses can be taken during year 1 or 2:

  • Compulsory: IR5007 and SO5512

PD5506: Getting Started at the University of Aberdeen

Candidates will select one course from the following:

Candidates will select 30 credits from the following:

Available Programmes of Study

Fees for individual programmes can be viewed in the Programme(s) above.

We will endeavour to make all course options available; however, these may be subject to timetabling and other constraints . Please see our InfoHub pages for further information.

Fee Information

Additional fee information.

  • Fees for individual programmes can be viewed in the Programmes section above.
  • In exceptional circumstances there may be additional fees associated with specialist courses, for example field trips. Any additional fees for a course can be found in our Catalogue of Courses .
  • For more information about tuition fees for this programme, including payment plans and our refund policy, please visit our InfoHub Tuition Fees page.

International Applicants

Further Information about tuition fees and the cost of living in Aberdeen

Scholarships

Self-funded international students enrolling on postgraduate taught (PGT) programmes will receive one of our Aberdeen Global Scholarships, ranging from £3000 to £8,500, depending on your domicile country. Learn more about the Aberdeen Global Scholarships here .

To see our full range of scholarships, visit our Funding Database .

How You'll Study

Teaching will comprise lectures, student-led seminars, student-led class presentations and close and critical reading of texts.

Learning Methods

Assessment methods.

By written exam, essay work, class presentation and project work as prescribed for each course and by submission of a dissertation.

Formative assessment comprises class presentations and student led seminars on which oral and written feedback will be provided

Summative assessment comprises discursive, reflective essays and a dissertation

Why Study International Political Economy?

  • You learn about moral philosophy in a contemporary discipline
  • You analyse tariff policies, political economies, social and political pressures and how these influence the political process
  • You learn about the impact of policies on the public and trade

Interested in this programme?

Entry requirements, qualifications.

The information below is provided as a guide only and does not guarantee entry to the University of Aberdeen.

Applicants for admission will normally be expected to hold a relevant Honours degree with a 2:1 standard from a recognised university or body in International Relations, Politics, Economics, Management, Business Studies, Law, Geography, History or cognate subject deemed appropriate by the School of Social Science.

Applicants without this qualification may be admitted subject to having an alternative qualification, or an approved level of work experience appropriate to the field of study e.g. government officials, members of UK or other armed forces, officials of International Organizations and business executives. Also taken into careful consideration is the trajectory of results, an applicant without an overall 2.1 but with 2.1 results in their final two years of study may be admitted.

Please enter your country to view country-specific entry requirements.

English Language Requirements

To study for a Postgraduate Taught degree at the University of Aberdeen it is essential that you can speak, understand, read, and write English fluently. The minimum requirements for this degree are as follows:

IELTS Academic:

OVERALL - 6.5 with: Listening - 5.5; Reading - 6.0; Speaking - 5.5; Writing - 6.0

OVERALL - 90 with: Listening - 17; Reading - 21; Speaking - 20; Writing - 21

PTE Academic:

OVERALL - 62 with: Listening - 59; Reading - 59; Speaking - 59; Writing - 59

Cambridge English B2 First, C1 Advanced or C2 Proficiency:

OVERALL - 176 with: Listening - 162; Reading - 169; Speaking - 162; Writing - 169

Read more about specific English Language requirements here .

Document Requirements

You will be required to supply the following documentation with your application as proof you meet the entry requirements of this degree programme. If you have not yet completed your current programme of study, then you can still apply and you can provide your Degree Certificate at a later date.

  • Information about visa and immigration requirements

Aberdeen Global Scholarship

Eligible self-funded post graduate taught (PGT) students will receive the Aberdeen Global Scholarship. Explore our Global Scholarships, including eligibility details, on our dedicated page.

Careers relating to International Political Economy involve policymaking and research in organizations working in the fields of development, health, energy law and migration. Many graduates choose to do public advocacy, research and project management work for non-governmental organisations (NGOS), and regional and global institutions such as the European Union or the United Nations. Graduates also forge careers in international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, international media, the armed forces, international risk management, and international corporations involved in trade and finance.

An MSc qualification in International Political Economy will be an important asset to you if you already hold an undergraduate degree in Business, Economics, International Relations or Politics, given the increasing demands for postgraduate qualifications in the job market. In addition, graduates from cognate disciplines can use this route to change their career path or improve their qualifications within the framework of an existing career. Careers: Development Diplomacy Civil Servant Finance Government NGOs IGOs

What our Alumni Say

Lea windischbauer.

Lea Windischbauer

"During my master's program, I had the opportunity to work with amazing peers and mentors. Their rich life and professional experience motivated me to "go an extra mile" with my career and create a network of friends for a lifetime."

Christian Ehiatue

Christian Ehiatue

"I had a wonderful experience studying International Political Economy at the University of Aberdeen. The lecturers are extremely helpful. And the learning environment was conducive to unlock my ability to understand and contribute to the current international debates whether on globalization, policies, trade, or the likes. It was awesome!"

Sofia Pesiou

Sofia Pesiou

“Overall, studying in University of Aberdeen was a unique experience. I had the chance to meet passionate lecturers with deep knowledge on their subjects who supported me at every step of the way. The resources were vast, the facilities were excellent and the outstanding library with the huge selection of books was an ideal place for studying”.

Inez Bhreagha Campbell

Inez Bhreagha Campbell

“The International Political Economy course is a great choice for someone new or needing a refresher to the subject area. It is interesting in that it is taught by a roster of instructors who promote meaningful dialogue and discussion on topics to engage learners and develop a holistic understanding of this interdisciplinary study. I recommend this course to anyone seeking to increase understanding in the intersectionality of politics, economics, and international relations."

Fadwa Kamal

Fadwa Kamal

The International Political Economy course allowed me to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the dichotomies that exist within political economics and their intersections with security, religion, and IR. My year at the University of Aberdeen had a positive impact on me. It did not only provide new horizons for my personal and professional development but, also a safe and friendly environment to discuss topics of common interest with students and lecturers with diverse backgrounds.

Our Experts

Information about staff changes.

You will be taught by a range of experts including professors, lecturers, teaching fellows and postgraduate tutors. Staff changes will occur from time to time; please see our InfoHub pages for further information.

In addition to currently hosting the Arab-Trans International Research Project, the University of Aberdeen is the home of several research centres and institutes.

Centre for Sustainable Development

Centre of excellence committed to inter-sectoral & interdisciplinary working for equity, social justice & sustainable futures. A space at the University for staff, students, practitioners & the public to develop collaborative teaching & research.

Centre For Global Security and Governance

The Centre for Global Security and Governance brings together academic experts, policy makers, and students to define, analyse, and propose remedies to the most pressing security and governance challenges the world faces in the 21st century.

The Institute For Conflict, Transition And Peace Research

ICTPR at the University of Aberdeen brings together a diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars and students to develop in-depth theoretical understandings of the concepts and practices of transitions in terms of conflict and peace.

Get in Touch

Contact details.

  • Enquire Now Using an online form
  • Bibliography
  • More Referencing guides Blog Automated transliteration Relevant bibliographies by topics
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  • Relevant bibliographies by topics
  • Referencing guides

Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'International political economy'

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Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'International political economy.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

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Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

Sattler, Thomas. "The political economy of international finance /." Zürich : ETH, 2007. http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/show?type=diss&nr=16925.

Potter, Christopher John. "Transnational corporations in international political economy." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/219.

Aquilante, Tommaso. "Essays in International Trade and Political Economy." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/216757.

Rouzet, Dorothee. "Essays on International Trade and Political Economy." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10433.

Ziegler, Nikolai. "The political economy of international trade negotiations /." Marburg : Tectum-Verl, 2009. http://d-nb.info/996811141/04.

Cheng, I.-Hui. "Three essays on political economy, trade and international economic integration." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314295.

Kim, Jundong. "The underground economy, political regimes, and economic growth : international evidence /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3025630.

Murgo, Daniel O. "Essays On Political Economy." FIU Digital Commons, 2010. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/149.

Djeredjian, Daron O. Lovely Mary E. "Essays in international trade theory and political economy." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.

Cao, Xun. "Convergence, divergence, and networks in international political economy /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/10793.

Gillespie, Piers. "Security in a post-hegemonic international political economy /." Title page and contents only, 1992. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arg478.pdf.

Parker, Paul Kenneth. "Global coal trade : an international political economy approach." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1990. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1097/.

Kiss, Áron. "Essays in political economy and international public finance." Frankfurt, M. Berlin Bern Bruxelles New York, NY Oxford Wien Lang, 2009. http://d-nb.info/99698240X/04.

Shin, Koo-Sik. "Political economy of protectionism in EC-Korea trade." Thesis, Boston Spa, U.K. : British Library Document Supply Centre, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.319196.

Waterman, K. "The political economy of U.S. military strategy." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/36040.

Lim, Jamus Jerome. "Essays on the political economy of international financial crises /." Diss., Digital Dissertations Database. Restricted to UC campuses, 2006. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.

FARIAS, ALEX JOBIM. "BRAZILS 1987 DEFAULT IN LIGHT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 1998. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=2640@1.

Abu, Gulal Saif Badr. "Political economy of international sanctions : the case of Iraq." Thesis, Durham University, 2003. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1254/.

Roden, Mark Allan. "The international political economy of contemporary US-China relations." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2001. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14814/.

Ozcelik, Emre. "Institutional Political Economy Of Economic Development And Global Governance." Phd thesis, METU, 2006. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12607360/index.pdf.

Andujar, Julio Gabriel. "Essays on the political economy of the dominican reform process." FIU Digital Commons, 1999. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1302.

Vattuone, Santiago Esteban. "Essays on the political economy of international financial institutions aid." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3311.

Yu, Zhihao. "Three essays on international trade, political economy and environmental policy." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape7/PQDD_0005/NQ39009.pdf.

Du, Plessis Marthinus Johannes. "The international political economy of the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/52543.

Ma, Jie. "Three essays in imperfect competition, political economy and international trade." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2006. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/191381/.

Milner, Wesley T. "Progress or Decline: International Political Economy and Basic Human Rights." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2180/.

Mustapha, Mala. "State, conflict and political economy of oil in Nigeria." Thesis, University of Central Lancashire, 2013. http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/10966/.

Derghoukassian, Khatchik. "Illicit Associations in the Global Political Economy: Courtesan Politics, Arms Trafficking and International Security." Scholarly Repository, 2010. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa_dissertations/467.

Anievas, Alexander. "Capital, states, and conflict : international political economy and crisis, 1914-1945." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252244.

Stoyanov, Andrey. "Essays in international trade, political economy of protection and firm heterogeneity." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/1010.

Keenes, Ernie (Ernest Morley) Carleton University Dissertation Political Science. "Embedded liberalism and Canada: state reorganization in the international political economy." Ottawa, 1991.

BONNET, PAOLO. "Essays on the Political Economy of Environmental Policies and International Trade." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Pavia, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/11571/1456947.

Li, Jie Sheng. "The political economy of foreign aid flows." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6735/.

Lim, Kevin (Kevin Shun Wei). "Estimating the effects of foreign bribery legislation in the international economy." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62471.

Walter, Andrew. "The role of hegemony and international monetary order." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304729.

O'Trakoun, John. "Essays on Conflict, Corruption, and International Trade Politics." Thesis, Boston College, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104393.

Lu, Tailai. "International Debt Crisis: Interaction of Economics and Politics." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1987. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc935791/.

Dikmen, Neslihan. "Political Economy Of China&#039." Master's thesis, METU, 2008. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12610171/index.pdf.

Langley, Paul. "World financial orders and world financial centres : an historical international political economy." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/698.

Malan, Franck Adonis. "International political economy : on the trajectories of policy-makers and reforms policies." Thesis, Normandie, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017NORMLH10/document.

Baines, A. C. "EMU and international monetary relations : the political economy of exchange rate policy." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.596267.

Newcomb, Helen Teresa. "Beyond states and markets : towards an international political economy of human security." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.431195.

Rodan, Garry. "The political economy of Singapore's industrialisation: State policy and international capital investment." Thesis, Rodan, Garry (1986) The political economy of Singapore's industrialisation: State policy and international capital investment. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 1986. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/41381/.

Rhodes, Thomas Christopher 1959. "The political economy of the Mount Graham International Observatory facility siting conflict." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278153.

Sabet-Esfahani, Shahrzad. "Prejudice and Protectionism: Essays at the Intersection of International Political Economy and Psychology." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11687.

O'Neil, Kimberly. "Nuclear fusion: The political economy of technology in France and Germany." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6737.

Nemani, Frederick. "The historical origins of the formation of Iran's contemporary political economy." Thesis, London South Bank University, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323904.

Liebman, Benjamin H. "Three empirical studies on the political economy of U.S. trade protection /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3095259.

Schalke, Thomas. "The Political Economy of Participation in the Euro: A Case Study of Italy and Germany." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1769.

Tanner, Kathryn Cavanaugh. "Networks and economic exchange : the international political economy of the seashell trade between Tanzania and India." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.612835.

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80 Political Economics Research Topics

FacebookXEmailWhatsAppRedditPinterestLinkedInResearch topics are the heart and soul of any academic journey, and when it comes to delving into the intricate world of Political Economics, the quest for the perfect research topic is no less critical. Whether you’re an undergraduate student seeking to lay the foundation for your academic career, a master’s candidate ready to explore […]

Political Economy Research Topics

Research topics are the heart and soul of any academic journey, and when it comes to delving into the intricate world of Political Economics, the quest for the perfect research topic is no less critical. Whether you’re an undergraduate student seeking to lay the foundation for your academic career, a master’s candidate ready to explore the depths of this fascinating field, or a doctoral aspirant looking to leave your mark, the realm of Political Economics offers a myriad of possibilities for your thesis or dissertation. In this guide, we will navigate this complex terrain together, unveiling a range of thought-provoking and timely research topics that will inspire and ignite your scholarly pursuits. So, let’s embark on this intellectual journey as we uncover the rich tapestry of Political Economics research topics that await your exploration.

Political Economy, also called the “economics of politics,” “economic politics,” and “politics of economics,” is a multifaceted field of study that investigates the interplay between politics and economics, seeking to understand how government policies, institutions, and politics processes impact economic systems and, in turn, shape the well-being of societies.

A List Of Potential Research Topics In Political Economics:

  • Examining the influence of digital technology and e-commerce on international trade patterns.
  • Investigating the role of international organizations in shaping global economic policies in the aftermath of the pandemic.
  • Investigating the sustainability of supply chains and global trade patterns in a post-pandemic world.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures in promoting economic growth.
  • Exploring the relationship between economic sanctions and diplomatic negotiations.
  • Investigating the role of multinational corporations in shaping global tax policies.
  • Assessing the economic implications of the UK’s energy transition and renewable energy investments.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of economic diversification strategies in resource-dependent economies.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of sovereign wealth funds in managing natural resource revenues.
  • Assessing the role of political polarization in shaping economic policy decisions in the UK.
  • Analyzing the economic consequences of healthcare disparities in minority communities.
  • Assessing the effectiveness of income redistribution policies in mitigating economic disparities exacerbated by COVID-19.
  • Investigating the impact of globalization on labor rights and working conditions.
  • Exploring the relationship between political Economy and developmental psychology in shaping economic policies.
  • Examining the challenges and opportunities of digital innovation in the UK’s political Economy.
  • Investigating the impact of monetary policy on inflation and economic stability.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of financial regulations in preventing systemic financial crises.
  • Examining the influence of government regulations on the gig economy and labor market dynamics.
  • Reviewing the challenges and opportunities of international cooperation in addressing economic and financial crises.
  • Examining the influence of income inequality on social cohesion and trust in institutions.
  • Examining the influence of political stability on foreign direct investment flows.
  • Exploring the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability.
  • Investigating the impact of income tax policy on income mobility and wealth accumulation.
  • Assessing the role of economic factors in shaping public opinion on immigration.
  • Analyzing the role of international institutions in governing global economic affairs.
  • Evaluating the relationship between economic development and democratization in emerging economies.
  • Examining the relationship between income inequality and political polarization.
  • Exploring the relationship between pandemic-induced uncertainty and investment behavior in financial markets.
  • Examining the role of political institutions in shaping income distribution policies.
  • Exploring the relationship between political instability and foreign direct investment.
  • Investigating the economic consequences of global health crises and pandemic preparedness.
  • Analyzing the economic consequences of government subsidies in agriculture.
  • Investigating the effects of austerity measures on income inequality and social welfare in the UK.
  • Assessing the role of economic sanctions in coercive diplomacy strategies.
  • Exploring the relationship between economic nationalism and international trade.
  • Analyzing the economic consequences of trade imbalances and currency manipulation.
  • Assessing the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool in the modern world.
  • Investigating the impact of demographic changes on pension and retirement systems.
  • Examining the influence of political ideology on fiscal policy choices.
  • Assessing the economic consequences of currency devaluation in developing nations.
  • Investigating the impact of political instability on foreign direct investment.
  • Analyzing the role of digital currencies and blockchain technology in reshaping monetary policy and financial systems.
  • Exploring the role of the financial services sector in the UK’s post-Brexit economic landscape.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of social safety net programs in reducing poverty rates.
  • Analyzing the economic implications of trade disputes and tariff wars.
  • Investigating the impact of fiscal policy on income distribution in advanced industrialized countries.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of austerity measures in addressing fiscal crises.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of job training programs in addressing unemployment.
  • Investigating the impact of political institutions on fiscal discipline and budget deficits.
  • Examining the role of international financial institutions in sovereign debt crises.
  • Investigating the effects of trade wars and protectionism on global supply chains and economic growth.
  • Assessing the economic consequences of income tax evasion and offshore tax havens.
  • Evaluating the economic consequences of remote work adoption and its implications for labor markets.
  • Analyzing the impact of trade tariffs on global supply chains and economic growth.
  • Assessing the impact of globalization on income inequality and political stability worldwide.
  • Assessing the influence of political campaign financing on policy outcomes.
  • Exploring the economic consequences of global migration and refugee crises.
  • Analyzing the impact of political Economy on criminal law enforcement strategies.
  • Reviewing the evolution of political economy theories and paradigms over the past decade.
  • Exploring the economic consequences of income tax reform in developed economies.
  • Examining the influence of political ideology on government responses to economic challenges posed by COVID-19.
  • Examining the role of informal economies in developing countries’ economic growth.
  • Analyzing the economic implications of automation and artificial intelligence on job displacement.
  • Exploring the relationship between economic development and access to healthcare.
  • Assessing the role of social media in shaping political and economic discourse.
  • Assessing the role of corruption in hindering economic development in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of UK government policies in addressing regional economic disparities.
  • Exploring the relationship between income redistribution and economic growth.
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of public-private partnerships in infrastructure development.
  • Examining the role of economic inequality in political participation and voter turnout.
  • Analyzing the impact of Brexit on the UK’s economic relationships with the European Union and the rest of the world.
  • Analyzing the political Economy of climate change and the transition to a sustainable energy system.
  • Analyzing the role of gender inequality in economic development outcomes.
  • Assessing the influence of international trade on income convergence among nations.
  • Investigating the relationship between environmental sustainability and economic policies in the UK.
  • Assessing the impact of international trade agreements on domestic labor markets.
  • Examining the economic consequences of trade agreements negotiated by the UK as an independent entity.
  • Investigating the economic implications of natural resource extraction in developing countries.
  • Analyzing the impact of government stimulus packages on economic recovery and inequality post-COVID-19.
  • Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on fiscal policy strategies and debt sustainability in developing economies.

Finding the right research topic in academia is akin to selecting a compass for your academic journey. This guide has provided you with diverse Political Economy research topics of different degree levels, from undergraduate to doctoral. Whether you explore the intricacies of international trade, the impact of economics policies on voter behavior, or the complexities of economic development in emerging markets, your chosen path within Political Economy will offer you the opportunity to contribute to a deeper understanding of our world.

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Topics in International Economics

PhD Skills Development Module, Term 2

This module offers an overview of several active areas of research in international trade. It introduces frontier topics, insights, and tools, with the goal of preparing PhD students to conduct independent cutting-edge research in the field, as well as in adjacent fields where ideas and techniques from international trade may be useful, such as urban and spatial economics, labor, development, IO, finance, and macro. 

The module will consist of 10 two-hour lectures. The preliminary set of topics includes:

  • Trade, FDI and financial frictions (Kalina Manova)
  • Global value chains and production networks (Kalina Manova)
  • Trade and labor markets (Gabriel Ulyssea)
  • Trade within countries and development (Gabriel Ulyssea)
  • Cities and development (Gabriel Ulyssea)
  • Spatial and general equilibrium spillovers (Kirill Borusyak)
  • The effects of trade on welfare and inequality (Kirill Borusyak)

Students from University of London universities other than UCL are welcome to register.

Instructors

Lectures : TBA Office hours : TBA

Prerequistes

We strongly recommend that students take or audit EC532 “International Economics for Research Students” during Term 1 at the LSE. This module covers baseline models in international trade that provide useful foundations for the topics course at UCL. UCL students can easily register for EC532, and Daniella Harper can assist with the logistics.

No formal assessment is required for this skills development PhD module. In order to fully benefit from the module, students are strongly encouraged to complete all assigned reading and participate actively in class. Interested students are welcome to develop a 5-page project proposal that they could pursue as part of their dissertation and receive constructive feedback from the lecturers.  

Reading List

  • Foley, F. and K. Manova (2015). “International Trade, Multinational Activity, and Corporate Finance.” Annual Review of Economics 7: 119-46.
  • Manova, K. (2013). “Credit Constraints, Heterogeneous Firms and International Trade.” Review of Economic Studies 80: 711-44.
  • Antràs, P., Desai, M. and F. Foley (2009). “Multinational Firms, FDI Flows and Imperfect Capital Markets.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124: 1171-219.
  • Manova, K., Wei, S.-J. and Z. Zhang (2015). “Firm Exports and Multinational Activity under Credit Constraints.” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, p.574-88.
  • Bilir, K., Chor, D., and K. Manova (2019). “Host Country Financial Development and Multinational Activity.” European Economic Review 115: 192-220.
  • Berthou, A., Chung, J.H., Manova, K. and C. Sandoz (2018). “Trade, Productivity and (Mis)allocation." CEPR Working Paper.
  • Antràs, P. and D. Chor (2021). “Global Value Chains.” NBER Working Paper 28549.
  • Bernard, A. and A. Moxnes (2018). “Networks and Trade.” Annual Review of Economics 10: 65-85.
  • Bernard, A., Dhyne, E., Magerman, G., Manova, K. and A. Moxnes (2020). “The Origins of Firm Heterogeneity: A Production Network Approach." Journal of Political Economy (forthcoming).
  • Huang, H., Manova, K. and F. Pisch (2021). “Firm Heterogeneity and Imperfect Competition in Global Production Networks.” Mimeo.
  • Autor, D. H., Dorn, D. and Hanson, G. H. (2013). “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Impacts of Import Competition in the United States.” American Economic Review 103(6), 2121-2168.
  • Autor, D., Dorn, D. and Hanson, G. (2016) “The China Shock: Learning about Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade.” Annual Review of Economics 8, 205-240.    
  • Dix-Carneiro, Rafael, and Brian K. Kovak (2017). "Trade Liberalization and Regional Dynamics." American Economic Review 107: 2908-46.
  • Ponczek, Vladimir, and Gabriel Ulyssea (2021). "Enforcement of Labor Regulation and the Labor Market Effects of Trade: Evidence from Brazil." Conditionally accepted at Economic Journal.
  • Dix-Carneiro, Rafael, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Costas Meghir, and Gabriel Ulyssea (2021). “Trade and Informality in the Presence of Labor Market Frictions and Regulations.” NBER Working Paper 28391.
  • Donaldson, Dave (2018). "Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure." American Economic Review 108: 899-934.
  • Atkin, David, and Dave Donaldson (2015). “Who's Getting Globalized? The Size and Implications of Intra-national Trade Costs.” NBER Working Paper 21439.
  • Donaldson, D. and Hornbeck, R. (2016). “Railroads and American Economic Growth: A “Market Access” Approach.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(2), 799–858. 
  • Ahlfeldt GM, Redding SJ, Sturm DM, Wolf N. (2015). “The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall.” Econometrica 83: 2127-89.
  • Gharad Bryan, Edward Glaeser, Nick Tsivanidis (2020). “Cities in the Developing World.” Annual Review of Economics 12: 273-297.
  • Tsivanidis, Nick (2019). "Evaluating the Impact of Urban Transit Infrastructure: Evidence from Bogota’s Transmilenio." Mimeo.
  • Adão, R., Arkolakis, C. and Esposito, F. (2020). “General Equilibrium Indirect Effects in Space: Theory and Measurement.” Mimeo.
  • Adão, R., Kolesár, M. and Morales, E. (2019). “Shift-Share Designs: Theory and Inference.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(4), 1949–2010.
  • Borusyak, K., and Hull, P. (2021). “Non-Random Exposure to Exogenous Shocks: Theory and Applications.” Mimeo.
  • Borusyak, K., Hull, P. and Jaravel, X. (2020). “Quasi-Experimental Shift-Share Research Designs.” Review of Economic Studies (forthcoming).
  • Adão, R., Carrillo, P., Costinot, A., Donaldson, D. and Pomeranz, D. (2020). “Exports, Imports, and Earnings Inequality: Micro-Data and Macro-Lessons from Ecuador.” Mimeo .
  • Adão, R., Costinot, A. and Donaldson, D. (2017). “Nonparametric Counterfactual Predictions in Neoclassical Models of International Trade.” American Economic Review 107: 633–689. 
  • Arkolakis, C., Costinot, A. and Rodríguez-Clare, A. (2012). “New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?” American Economic Review 102: 94-130. 
  • Baqaee, D. R. and Farhi, E. (2021). “Networks, Barriers, and Trade.” Mimeo.
  • Borusyak, K. and Jaravel, X. (2021). “The Distributional Effects of Trade: Theory and Evidence from the United States.” Mimeo .

Penn State University Libraries

Pl sc 412: international political economy (world campus).

  • Getting Started
  • Exploring Topics
  • Search Strategies Exercise
  • Journal Articles
  • Data Sources
  • Specialized Sources

Term Paper Overview

  • You will write a term paper on a relevant topic of interest to you.  The basic idea is for you to apply a theory or small set of theories to an issue in international political economy to drive predictions regarding the likely course of events over the next 5-10 or 10- 20 years. You will work on the paper in stages and be graded on your work over the course of the semester.  After submitting a rough draft, you will review another student’s paper and get peer feedback on your draft.

Term Paper Stages

1.  Research Paper Topic : You will write a short paragraph outlining the general topic of your research paper. General topics include, but are not limited to, trade relations, hegemony, the exchange rate, development and globalization. You will then describe the specific subtopic you are interested in. If, for example, your general topic is globalization, some subtopics might be sweatshops or the effect of globalization on the environment.

2.  Research Question: You will write one short paragraph that first presents your initial research question. Make sure that your research question asks what factors, variables, or conditions affect some aspect of your subtopic and focuses on cause-and-effect relationships.

  • You should avoid descriptive and prescriptive questions.  The former leads to research papers that simply describe a process or an event, while the latter results in research papers that tell us what we can or should do to change, fix, or prevent some undesirable situation.
  • For example, if your subtopic is the effect of globalization on the environment under the general topic of the globalization, an appropriate research question might be “under what conditions will countries cooperate to reduce pollution?” Inappropriate research questions might be “which states are the biggest polluters?” and “what should be done to reduce pollution?”

3.  Bibliography: You will submit a preliminary bibliography that should consist primarily of scholarly works associated with your research topic, such as books, journal articles, and other published studies that have been subjected to peer review. University presses, as well as many other reputable publishers, produce peer-reviewed books.

  • American Political Science Review
  • American Journal of Political Science
  • International Organization
  • International Studies Quarterly
  • World Politics International
  • Journal of Political Economy
  • Your bibliography must follow the guidelines found in the American Political Science Association’s Style Manual for Political Science.  (See the Citations page of this guide for link.)

4.  Theory Overview : The reading you do will allow you to become acquainted with different theories (or "models" as they are often called) about the phenomenon that you’re interested in. Review the most prominent or compelling theories. If there are competing theories, highlight their distinguishing factors.

5.  Thesis Statement : You will write one or two sentences that represent your thesis statement. This thesis statement should be a concise summary of your research paper’s argument or analysis. In other words, the thesis statement summarizes your findings, your predictions and your argument. It is “the punch line” of your paper and what follows fills out and supports this statement.

6.  Detailed Outline : You will provide a detailed outline of the various sections of your research paper. These sections may include, but are not limited to, the introduction (including your thesis statement), theory review, analysis, and conclusions.

7.  Rough Draft : You will submit a rough draft of your research paper for peer review. This draft does not have to be perfect. It simply represents your first attempt to put your thoughts in final form. However, the more work you put into this rough draft, the more likely it is that you will receive useful feedback from the peer review. You will get full credit for submitting the draft. (I will not be grading content at this point.) If you do not submit the rough draft you WILL NOT get any credit for completing a peer review.

8.  Peer Review:   You will provide constructive feedback on one classmate’s rough draft.  Using track changes and the insertion of comments, offer as much constructive criticism on your classmate’s paper as possible.  Constructive criticism is criticism that is intended to improve the paper and often identifies solutions to problems in a positive and productive way.  You might want to think about this peer review as a valuable opportunity to improve your own writing; as you edit and comment upon your classmate's work, you might discover things that you should or should not do in future essays and research papers. You will not get credit for this portion if you do not submit a rough draft yourself.

9.  Final Paper: Your final paper must be between 6-8 pages in length, double-spaced with 12-point Times New Roman font and 1-inch margins. Your paper must also include proper parenthetical citations and bibliography, following the guidelines found in the American Political Science Association’s Style Manual for Political Science.  (See the Citations page of this guide for link.)   Please upload your paper in Word (or Pages), not pdf.

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    Dissertation Advisor: Professor Asim Khwaja Author: Muhammad Asad Liaqat Essays in Development Economics and Political Economy Abstract This dissertation consists of three field experiments that explore how information and the social environment affect accountability and the provision of public goods in developing countries.

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    This thesis contains three independent research papers on political economy of development with a unified focus on leadership and decision makings within real world environments. The first chapter deals with country-cross experience using authoritarian turnovers, defined as a transition within nondemocratic regimes, as natural experiments. The final two chapters consists of China-based papers ...

  8. PDF Essays in International Finance and the Political Economy of Capital Flows

    Essays in International Finance and the Political Economy of Capital Flows Citation Kearney, Casey. 2023. Essays in International Finance and the Political Economy of Capital Flows. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. ... In this dissertation I examine how

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    Essays on Political Economy and Macroeconomics A dissertation presented by Brian Wheaton to ... This dissertation consists of four essays on a range of topics in political economy and macroeconomics which are united by having current policy relevance. The first essay studies the effects of social policy laws on beliefs and attitudes held by the ...

  10. International Political Economy Theses

    The mission of the International Political Economy Program is to prepare students to be global citizens and future leaders in business, public service, and civil society. The IPE Program promotes an interdisciplinary understanding and appreciation of global problems and challenges students to achieve both breadth and depth of understanding about the interdependent world in which they live.

  11. 80 International Economics Research Topics For Dissertation

    A List Of Potential Research Topics In International Economics: Examining the role of trade in the diffusion of technology and innovation. Examining the impact of intellectual property rights on technology transfer in international trade. Investigating the relationship between foreign aid and trade liberalization in recipient countries.

  12. Dissertations

    Research Design and Dissertation in International Development. The DV410 dissertation is a major component of the MSc programme and an important part of the learning and development process involved in postgraduate education. The objective of DV410 is to provide students with an overview of the resources available to them to research and write a 10,000 dissertation that is topical, original ...

  13. PDF Essays in Political Economy

    The thesis is composed of three chapters on political economy. Each chapter tries to answer policy relevant questions by extending seminal models. Each part is introduced with a detailed abstract of that particular chapter, therefore here I will give a short overview of the entire thesis.

  14. Dissertation for MSc Political Economy of Development

    Students are required to complete a 10,000-word dissertation in an approved topic in the political economy of development (100% of module mark). Students are encouraged to select topics appropriate to their specific programme and expertise within the Department more generally. Students are required to submit a proposed dissertation title ...

  15. International political economy dissertation topics

    International political economy dissertation topics . Chinese economic and international political science highlights the relationships between national and cannot be expected to come up with how economics. Master seminar on the paper is the course introduces the economic system because the needs of international political economy.

  16. International Political Economy, MSc

    Dissertation in International Political Economy (IR5905) ... Introduces students to the key theories and themes in the disciplinary study of International Political Economy. Topics covered include global inequality and wealth distribution; financialization and crisis; precarization of work; global regulation of trade, labour, and money; gender ...

  17. Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Political

    Essays on Political Economy . Fonseca Galvis, Angela M. (2015-05-19) This dissertation consists of three essays on political economy. The first essay studies the effect of competition on media bias in the context of U.S. newspapers in the period 1870-1910.

  18. Dissertations / Theses: 'International political economy'

    List of dissertations / theses on the topic 'International political economy'. Scholarly publications with full text pdf download. Related research topic ideas.

  19. Erasmus University Thesis Repository: International Political Economy

    Optimal upgrade planning: An application in a desktop computer masterThesis. Paspalas, P. March 2024.

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    A List Of Potential Research Topics In Political Economics: Examining the influence of digital technology and e-commerce on international trade patterns. Investigating the role of international organizations in shaping global economic policies in the aftermath of the pandemic. Investigating the sustainability of supply chains and global trade ...

  21. Topics in International Economics

    PhD Skills Development Module, Term 2. Outline. This module offers an overview of several active areas of research in international trade. It introduces frontier topics, insights, and tools, with the goal of preparing PhD students to conduct independent cutting-edge research in the field, as well as in adjacent fields where ideas and techniques from international trade may be useful, such as ...

  22. International Political Economy Dissertation Topics

    International Political Economy Dissertation Topics - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.

  23. PL SC 412: International Political Economy (World Campus)

    Research Paper Topic: You will write a short paragraph outlining the general topic of your research paper. General topics include, but are not limited to, trade relations, hegemony, the exchange rate, development and globalization. ... World Politics International; Journal of Political Economy; ... Thesis Statement: You will write one or two ...

  24. IMF Warns Surge in U.S., China Debt Could Have 'Profound' Impact on

    The U.S. and Chinese governments should take action to lower future borrowing, as a surge in their debts threatens to have "profound" effects on the global economy, the International Monetary ...