Ethan B. Kapstein

The corporate ethics crusade

Are multinational enterprises getting religion? So it seems. Around the world, corporate codes of conduct on human rights, labor standards, and environmental performance are proliferating. These codes reflect the growing pressure being placed on firms by nongovernmental organizations (ngos), activist shareholders, and the portfolio managers of socially responsible investment funds. A veritable corporate ethics crusade has been launched, and it has been surprisingly successful in forcing executives to take its concerns into account.

Workers and the World Economy

The global economy is leaving millions of disaffected workers in its train. Inequality, unemployment, and endemic poverty have be come its handmaidens. Rapid technological change and heightening international competition are fraying the job markets of the major in dustrialized countries. At the same time systemic pressures are cur tailing every government s ability to respond with new spending. Just when working people most need the nation-state as a buffer from the world economy, it is abandoning them. This is not how things were supposed to work. The failure of today s advanced global capitalism to keep spreading the wealth poses a challenge not just to policymakers but to modern economic science as well. For generations, students were taught that increasing trade and investment, coupled with technological change, would drive na tional productivity and create wealth. Yet over the past decade, despite a continuing boom in international trade and finance, productivity has faltered, and inequality in the United States and unemployment in Europe have worsened. President Bill Clinton may have been right to proclaim that the era of big government is over, and perhaps the American people will ulti mately decide that those who need assistance should look elsewhere for help. But if the post-World War II social contract with workers?offull

Between power and purpose: Central bankers and the politics of regulatory convergence

In the early 1980s, when the debt crisis threatened to disrupt the pattern of trade and investment flows that had evolved since the end of World War II, central bankers faced the challenge of maintaining public confidence in the commercial banks that were at the heart of the international payments system. Although the central bankers agreed that a run on one international bank could lead to a global catastrophe requiring massive government intervention, they did not initially agree on a policy project to strengthen the international payments system. In analyzing central bank cooperation and the processes leading to the adoption of a single international capital adequacy standard, this article argues that agreement on a uniform standard was due to a combination of political power and shared purpose on the part of the United States and Britain. While the article does not argue that the central bankers were an epistemic community as defined in this issue, it further explores the conditions under which epistemic communities are likely to arise.

Winners and Losers in the Global Economy

During the 1980s, economists began to observe a trend of rising income inequality in the advanced industrial economies. At the same time, the data revealed that these economies were becoming increasingly exposed to imports of manufactured goods from developing countries. The question that follows is whether these outcomes are causally related, as economic theory suggests is possible.

Unipolar politics : realism and state strategies after the Cold War

1. Realism and International Relations After the Cold War, by Michael Mastanduno and Ethan B. Kapstein2. Realism and the Present Great Power System: Growth and Positional Conflict Over Scarce Resources, by Randall L. Schweller3. The Political Economy of Realism, by Jonathan Kirshner4. Realism Structural Liberalism, and the Western Order, by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberr5. Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy After the Cold War, by Michael Mastanduno6. Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy, by Eric Heginbotham and Richard J. Samuels7. Realism and Russian Strategy after the Collapse of the USSR, by Neil MacFarlane8. Realism(s) and Chinese Security Policy in the Post-Cold War Period, by Alastair Iain Johnston9. Realism and Regionalism: American Power and German and Japanese Institutional Strategies During and After the Cold War, by Joseph M. Grieco10. Realism and Reconciliation: France, Germany, and the European Union, by Michael Loriaux11. Neorealism Nuclear Proliferation, and East-Central European Strategies, by Mark Kramer12. Does Unipolarity Have A Future?, by Ethan B. Kapstein

The Baby Trade

The international adoption trade is booming, as more families in the West adopt more babies from developing countries. But it has spawned a sordid black market as well, in which children are bought or abducted and sold. The best way to stop the trafficking is not to ban adoptions from countries that tolerate corrupt rings, but to strengthen the underdeveloped multilateral legal regime that regulates adoptions around the planet

Is realism dead? The domestic sources of international politics

Is realism dead? Has it finally succumbed to the theoretical and empirical onslaught to which it has been subjected? If the answer is yes, which theories have taken its place? If the answer is no, what explains its durability? I argue in this essay that structural realism, qua theory, must be viewed as deeply and perhaps fatally flawed. Yet at the same time, qua paradigm or worldview, it continues to inform the community of international relations scholars. The reason for this apparent paradox is no less sociological than epistemological. Borrowing from Thomas Kuhn, I argue that structural realism will not die as the cornerstone of international relations theory until an alternative is developed that takes its place.2 In the absence of that alternative, students of world politics will continue to use it as their cornerstone; in an important sense, structural realism continues to define the discipline.

The political economy of national security : a global perspective

CHAPTER 1: Defense Economics in Historical PerspectivePART I: MACRO-ISSUESCHAPTER 2: Defense Spending and BudgetingCHAPTER 3: Mobilization, War, and ConversionPART II: MICRO-ISSUESCHAPTER 4: Defense Industries in the World EconomyCHAPTER 5: Weapons ProcurementPART III: INTERNATIONAL ISSUESCHAPTER 6: The Arms TradeCHAPTER 7: Economic Relations Among Military AlliesCHAPTER 8: National Security and the Global EconomyCHAPTER 9: Conclusions

Inequality, growth, and democracy

The analysis of the relationship between inequality and economic growth in distinct politicoeconomic environments has been one of the central preoccupations of the extensive theoretical and empirical work on growth in the last decade. The authors argue that the empirical evidence available to date strongly indicates the relevance of this work for understanding the elusive causal connection between economic development and democracy. The state of the literature suggests considerable sophistication in conceptualizing the direct economic effects of inequality and contains critical insights into politically unconstrained policy-making aimed at the alleviation of their negative economic impact. However, the political feasibility of the recommended policy measures and the politically mediated effects of inequality and redistributive policy on growth and on the strength and stability of democratic regimes are understood less well. The authors discuss the critical factors influencing these effects and sketch several approaches to creating a comprehensive politicoeconomic account of the interaction between inequality, redistributive policy-making, and political regimes.

Allies and Armaments

One, often neglected, way to measure the health of the NATO alliance is through an exploration of European weapons-procurement policy. To be sure, weapons-procurement decisions only provide a single case study with respect to alliance relations - hardly a complete view of the political landscape. But neither should transatlantic efforts to shape the defence acquisition environment be dismissed as tangential to security policy. Ever since its inception, NATO has striven to promote the rationalisation, standardisation and inter-operability of alliance weaponry. From this defence-industrial perspective, the alliance has made great strides over the past decade. For its part, the United States has undertaken a major reform of its technology-transfer bureaucracy, with the aim of promoting more transatlantic weapons collaboration. Alongside that development, the Europeans have engaged in a radical restructuring of their defence industries, making them bigger and more competitive. These changes suggest continuing efforts on each side of the Atlantic to maintain if not strengthen their security relationship.