Global Working Paper Series
At the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS), we are actively engaged in publishing new research. The Duke Global Working Paper Series provides a space for scholars from across the disciplines to explore international topics. DUCIGS welcomes submissions from Duke experts and affiliated scholars.
Papers in this series are published to the Social Science Research Network as part of the Duke Global Working Paper Series. This series is edited by Giovanni Zanalda.
For the style guide and submission form visit: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6zFTllGEGelzUZT
For more information, email Rohini Thakkar (rt54@duke.edu).
Reciprocity has been the fundamental principle underlying the postwar international trade regime. Born as the antithesis of beggar-thy-neighbor trade policy, the reciprocal principle not only helped the United States mutually reduce tariffs with other countries and established the multilateral trade regime in the postwar era, but also sustain the European integration by removing various trade and investment barriers, which eventually led to the rise of the European Union. As a result of practicing the reciprocal principle, intra-industry trade developed greatly among European countries and the United States, which not only glued the Western alliance together during the Cold War but also prevented developed countries from engaging themselves in major trade conflicts in the past decades. The Japanese and Chinese failures of reducing trade and investment barriers under the reciprocal principle and the lack of development of intra-industry trade after becoming an economic superpower were the driving forces behind the US-Japan trade war and the US-China trade war. For China to become a developed country, it needs to embrace the reciprocal principle, remove trade and investment barriers, and develop the intra-industry trade in high tech and new tech industries with developed countries.
Although the Thucydides trap is often used to predict a dark future of the US-China relations, the Samuelson trap is a more useful concept to understand the international economic foundation underlying this potential tragic outcome of international politics. In order to avoid the Thucydides trap, China needs to get out of the Samuelson trap first. The fact that China fell into the Samuelson trap is partly due to its blind belief in the comparative advantage theory that explains international trade purely in terms of factor endowments. A better path for China is to get informed by the literature on international political economy that analyzes how trade liberalization affects domestic politics, and adjust the distribution of trade interests with its trading partners.
Contemporary world politics is structured around the world order of nation-states in turn founded largely upon a Newtonian cosmology and an associated worldview. I develop a conceptual framework around the ‘epistemic engine’ which organizes and circulates the cosmological and institutional structures of Enlightenment modernity. Subsequently, I explore how the imperial Chinese world order-- functional until at least the late 19th century--reveals a different cosmology shaping a different world order and politics. I also explore the contemporary PRC view of the world order probing the extent to which its historical experiences can be seen to re-shape the hegemonic epistemic engine. In the final section, I draw from a paradigm of ‘oceanic temporality’ to grasp counter-finalities generated by the epistemic engine on the earth and the ocean itself. Can the counter-flows of social movements allow us to imagine a post-Enlightenment, planetary cosmology?
This study identifies the impact of information on households’ choice of energy technologies in rural communities of two Indian States: Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. I conducted a randomized control trial with an intervention in the form of information campaigns that provided information benefits and costs of household air pollution and promoted the use of improved energy technologies. This intervention varied by the type of information dissemination and the gender of the information recipient across different treatment groups. I find that the adoption of pressure cookers and improved cookstoves increased when women received information. This result was driven by the adoption rates in Kerala. In contrast, there was increased adoption of LED lamps in both states, regardless of whether women or men received information. The findings from this study underscore the importance of the gendered nature of energy use and the gender-based agency among the factors influencing the energy adoption decisions.
This white paper provides a legal analysis to align the 1972 World Heritage Convention and the UNESCO Constitution and its commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. It sets out recommendations for UNESCO, the World Heritage governing bodies, and States Parties to ensure properties on the World Heritage List and Tentative Lists are not sites of serious, systematic violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law.
Nearly three billion people continue to use wood fuels for their daily cooking. The global policy discourse increasingly emphasizes clean fuels, notably gas and electricity. Yet, electricity and gas are expensive, and their supply chains are typically interrupted in rural areas. They will hence not reach the global poor soon, especially in Africa. As an alternative, this paper shows that fuel-efficient biomass stoves can contribute climate mitigation potentials in Sub-Saharan Africa that exceed the total CO2-equivalent emissions of a medium-sized European country. Abatement costs of this policy are low at $2 to 10 per ton. Furthermore, we demonstrate that cooking-related emissions will likely double by 2050. We conclude by arguing that a rapid dissemination policy should be based on two crucial steps: First, fuel-efficient stoves should be field-tested region by region and adapted to satisfy local cooking needs. Second, cookstoves that have proven to be adopted by users should be heavily subsidized at scale.
We examine a solar home systems (SHS) subsidy policy of Nepal. We first estimate the effect of additional subsidy on SHS adoption and then its downstream benefits - children’s education, time allocated to agricultural and household work (both unpaid) and working for a wage. We use geographic regression discontinuity design with (cost) distance as the assignment variable. Our results show that subsidy-eligible households are about 45% more likely to adopt SHS and 43% less likely to use kerosene lamp that emits roughly 2.1 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent GWP. We find a positive effect of the SHS adoption on the grade for age with the effect being higher on girls than boys. We also find that females are about 33% more likely to participate in work for agriculture and males are 26% more likely to participate in household work. However, there is no effect on the participation rates across the labour market.
Economists generally believe that more choice is beneficial, yet bigger choice sets can impose opportunity, error and cognitive costs that lower demand. We study this relationship in the context of rural energy use in low-income settings. We invited approximately 1,100 randomly selected Senegalese households to participate in second-price auctions for improved cookstoves, and exogenously varied the number and types of devices being auctioned to identify the causal impact of expanded choice on willingness to pay (WTP). Expanded choice lowered WTP for a more advanced but relatively unfamiliar cookstove by 25 percent, but had no effect on WTP for a simpler, locally-produced device. Households’ ability to compare alternatives side-by-side during multi device auctions and identify the one best suited to their needs appears to drivethese results. Our findings have implications for the design of policies that aim to introduce welfare-improving technologies in remote, rural areas.
This paper has conducted a literature review of the international scenario of the local governance and covid19 (including best practices) followed by an empirical examination of risk perception and state of local governance in the two most populous states in India (UP and Bihar) with a joint population of over 300 million. Plenty of work during COVID 19 suggests multiple problems, solutions and best local practices. However, very little is known about linkages between pandemic, its community perception and local response mechanism in high population countries having scarce resources. The result of logistic regression (N=2041) shows non-migrants and females perceive no risk of COVID despite having heard of Corona, showing a perception and behavioural issue that requires special local governing attention in such societies. Further, analysis reveals infection rate is high in the districts where complete elected council is not present and are only governed by chiefs of the villages. In such a deficient state of local governance, the COVID problem could be handled by community policing instead of totally relying on strict lockdown.
China’s annual global health aid has increased substantially since the 2000s. Unlike many donors, China has no official aid reporting obligations, nor does it voluntarily disclose detailed aid information. Because of this, several third parties have attempted to estimate China’s health aid footprint. Unfortunately, current estimates use varied definitions of health aid, geographic regions, and time spans. These distinct and differing methodological approaches make it difficult to compare Chinese aid to aid from other donors. Our study builds on previous tracking efforts and takes them further by creating a standardized estimate using commonly accepted definitions of aid and frameworks for categorizing health projects.
These findings enable a better understanding of Chinese health aid in the absence of transparent aid reporting. We believe such an understanding could lead to better coordination, collaboration, and resource allocation for both donors and recipient countries.