Scott Y. Lin

State Capitalism and Chinese Food Security Governance

Since the financial crisis of 2008–9, how a state can play a more active role in correcting market failure has become a central topic in political economy. Thus, academia is again discussing state capitalism seriously. Contemporary state capitalism assumes state intervention in markets is becoming more multifaceted. Consequently, traditional state-owned enterprises exist alongside new government-favored actors, such as privately owned national champions and sovereign wealth funds, intervening in markets. This coalition helps the state achieve its security, political, economic, social, and nationalistic goals more efficiently. Its growing power in markets also heralds the return of state capitalism. This paper uses state capitalism theories to re-interpret Chinas food security governance. The three preliminary findings are as follows. First, Chinas food security governance is typically operated under state capitalism, which has successfully managed Chinas food availability , though not without some corruption, but has weakened its food accessibility . Second, using state capitalism to manage Chinas food safety has been impeded, so the effects remain to be seen. Third, state capitalism has successfully improved the stability of the food supply and demand in China, but its agricultural business branching-out strategy has worried the international community and should be observed further.

Transnational Farmland Acquisition in the International Political Economy: Towards a Better Understanding of Theory, Approach, and Governance

ABSTRACT A new wave of transnational farmland acquisition recently emerged, giving rise to two questions: What are the approaches in this wave of farmland acquisition and have relevant regulations been created for governance? Theories of international political economy are used to analyze the acquisition race, with two findings. First, grain-importing countries in Asia and the Persian Gulf region tend to use economic nationalism to conduct acquisition. Developed countries in the West tend towards liberalism, with market interests being the driving force behind acquisition, and the civil society of host countries in the South generally embrace both Marxism and liberalism, hoping to evaluate the acquisition process from perspectives of human rights and responsible farmland investment. Second, the existing governance regulations tend to favor investor countries’ interests, leaving host countries’ food security insufficiently protected.

Defence Expenditures: Theory and Empirics

Abstract There has been an extensive amount of research on the determinants of military spending over the last 25 years. These studies underline that military spending is a complicated concept, with economic capabilities, political processes and military linkages playing an interdependent role at the national, regional and global levels. Recent works focus on other outcomes of military spending. This chapter develops a model of conflict that generates a demand for military personnel and equipment by countries for either aggressive or defensive purposes. This model highlights some of the key determinants of military spending. Using pooled time-series, cross-sectional data on military spending for 146 countries from 1998 to 2007 we test this model and analyze other possible factors that previously have not been explored in the literature.

Same Evidences, Different Interpretations – A Comparison of the Conflict Index between the Interstate Dyadic Events Data and Militarized Interstate Disputes Data in Peace-Conflict Models

Abstract Studying the determinants of international conflict, researchers have found a series of influential variables, but few have addressed the robustness of the results to changes in the definition of the dependent variable, conflict. The two main sources for operationalizing conflict in empirical work are data on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and events data. In this paper, we find that a χ2-test indicates a correlation between events data and MIDs data. However, detailed regression analysis indicates that there are some contradictory findings depending on whether we use events data as opposed to MIDs data to measure conflict.