Asian Review of Political Economy最新文献

The full understanding of the importance of submarine cables as part of the global network infrastructure in the digital economy era, along with decades of knowledge accumulation in this field, has not prevented Hong Kong from facing increasing difficulties in gaining more access to submarine cable systems since 2017. Given that geopolitical differences between China and the U.S. are dividing the international network infrastructure, the business interests of Hong Kong enterprises and the urban development prospects of the Hong Kong government have been forced to defer to Beijing’s security concerns. Meanwhile, in recent years China has been acquiring data power by modelling the “data collection – data sharing – data space governance” path that the United States and its allies set previously. During this process, the power shaped by China’s unique technological, social and institutional characteristics offers an alternative to American dominance, although it exacerbates the global divergence of internet infrastructure. Many projects along the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road are the examples of China’s data power projection, and will bring opportunities for Hong Kong’s own submarine cables sector and for the city’s role as a super connector in the coming years.

Amid economic globalisation and the rapid development of advanced technologies in recent years, the world economy has shown an increasing trend of digitalisation, whilst digital trade has become the primary pattern of international trade. Based on differences rooted in socio-political systems, as well as the current precarious geopolitical realities, governments adopt different ideas in accordance with their respective interests in the institutionalisation of digital trade. As the world’s second-largest economy and a major digital power, China’s behaviours and ideological stances attract scholarly attention and states’ concern. Whilst Western countries and scholars have criticised China’s ideas of “government intervention in data regulation” and “cyber sovereignty” applied in its existing approach to digital trade, warning that China’s approach poses a threat to Western powers’ adherence to liberalism in the international digital trade system and the idea of “free data flow” in their approaches to digital trade, there has been insufficient research into how China’s approach to digital trade has evolved over time and which ideas and interests have influenced it. To bridge this gap in the literature, this paper divides the evolution of China’s approach to digital trade over the past three decades (1993–2023) into three phases using a longitudinal approach. This research conducts qualitative content analysis using official documents, white papers, and declarations from official Chinese websites, then adopts the 3I analytical framework to analyse which ideas and interests have influenced China’s approach in each phase and how its approach to digital trade has evolved over time.

How has China’s privacy protection strategy been developed, with its broad scope and stringent requirements for data localization and cross-border data flows? What are the broader geopolitical implications of its divergence from Western models of data privacy? This paper argues that China's privacy protection strategy, characterized by its comprehensive regulatory framework and government access to data, is redefining the contours of global data governance and creating new geopolitical fault lines. Drawing on official documents, laws, regulations, and a case study, this paper highlights the evolution of the regulatory framework in response to emerging challenges posed by technological innovations and the wider geopolitical environment. This paper contributes to the broader discussion regarding the implications of China's privacy protection approach, highlighting potential normative clashes with countries that favor a more open digital economy. China's efforts in developing its own privacy protection strategy have also resulted in the formulation of global standards for data privacy.

This study examines sustainable development cooperation and the effectiveness of sustainable development partnerships in supporting national development in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study focuses on SDG 17, “Building Partnerships for Sustainable Development” and takes the Lao Democratic People’s Republic (Laos) as its case study. The study assesses Laos’s socio-economic condition, development trajectory and SDGs. It evaluates Laos’s development partnerships with China and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and wider development diplomacy. The study adopts a political economy perspective, drawing in global major power competition. The paper argues that development partnerships are pivotal to success in achieving national and global development goals. Laos holds the ASEAN Chair through 2024, whilst experiencing severe economic challenges domestically. Moving between these two domains, Laos will seek to achieve balance and even-handedness between regional and global interests. Laos’s long-standing development partnership with China and the BRI brings tangible results. However, the study concludes that greater diversification in building partnerships for development will provide additional support to Laos’s development strategy.

Political scientists have crafted intricate taxonomies to classify nations beyond liberal democracy, positioning these societies along an authoritarian continuum. Despite the pivotal role of journalists in accelerating political dynamics, there exists a lack of comparative research on media governance in these regimes. Consequently, this study scrutinizes the media governance ecosystems in Vietnam and Singapore. Vietnam is a one-party authoritarian state, whereas Singapore represents a hybrid political system. However, both countries exhibit a stable and uninterrupted rule by the respective ruling party. Our research uncovers the nuances of Singapore’s media regulation, which embeds trusted stakeholders with financial interests in key press roles to reinforce the implicit political norms. Conversely, Vietnam employs a more direct, coercive, and state-centric approach. Media actors in both nations occasionally test the boundaries of acceptable discourses, with each government’s responses being shaped by specific contexts and broader history. Reforms in Vietnam, embracing privatization and commercialization, mirror Singapore’s integration of capitalism, public ownership, and commercial interests when governing media. These findings highlight diverse yet effective authoritarian media governance strategies, unique features, and commonalities in both systems. Overall, media structures in these Southeast Asian countries have undergone profound evolutions towards more sophisticated regulatory tools to manage societal and political transformations.

Existing studies show that regulation is a major barrier to global economic integration. Nonetheless, identifying and measuring regulatory barriers remains a challenging task for scholars. I propose a novel approach to quantify regulatory barriers at the country-year level. Utilizing information from annual reports of publicly listed companies in the U.S., I identify regulatory barriers business practitioners encounter. The barrier information is first extracted from the text documents by a cutting-edge neural language model trained on a hand-coded training set. Then, I feed the extracted barrier information into a dynamic item response theory model to estimate the numerical barrier level of 40 countries between 2006 and 2015 while controlling for various channels of confounding. I argue that the results returned by this approach should be less likely to be contaminated by major confounders such as international politics. Thus, they are well-suited for future political science research.

Why do states realign their foreign policies toward a major power? Conventional wisdom holds that change in political leadership tends to result in less drastic foreign policy realignment in countries with large winning coalitions. The current study capitalizes on this conventional wisdom by invoking a key insight of the selectorate theory, the non-linear welfare function. Since the welfare of coalition members falls before it rises as the size of winning coalition becomes larger, one should expect the stabilizing effects of winning coalitions to be the weakest for low-to-medium sized winning coalitions. Thus, leadership turnover in countries with middle-sized winning coalitions is expected to result in greater foreign policy realignment than in countries with very large or very small coalitions. We test this theoretical proposition by studying the foreign policies of 154 countries towards China from 1972 to 2015. With newly constructed measures of leadership turnover and winning coalitions size, the evidence supports a non-linear relationship between change in leadership and foreign policy realignment along the continuum of winning coalition size.

Does transnational anti-bribery enforcement affect the risk-mitigation strategies of firms? This paper uses an original dataset on the enforcement actions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to examine the law’s impact on corporate behavior and political risks for multinational corporations (MNCs). I argue that corrupt institutions are not necessarily undesirable for foreign investors. Foreign firms seek above-normal returns in high-risk markets through informal exchanges with the host government. FCPA enforcement provides a “fire alarm” that affects firms differently given their sensitivity to corruption concerns. FCPA enforcement has unequal deterrence against corporate misconduct, encouraging some firms to adopt transparency norms while incentivizing other firms to be more insidious in their corrupt business practices. I use a partial observability bivariate probit model to estimate the unobservable propensity of firms to engage in corrupt exchanges. Then I examine the impact of FCPA enforcement on Chinese FDI, and find that Chinese investments are deterred from markets with robust legal institutions. The FCPA’s deterrence effects against corrupt competitors is a positive outcome for U.S. MNCs. However, American companies experience diminished returns in countries with strong investor protection regimes. External legal interventions under the FCPA generate regulatory burdens on U.S. that limit their business opportunities.

The emergence of China as a major provider of development finance has garnered considerable scholarly debate. Chinese investments and their impact on recipient states have been extensively studied, mainly focusing on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In response to the BRI, the European Commission recently announced its connectivity strategy, the Global Gateway initiative. In this context, and even before the announcement, little work has been done to map Chinese state capitalist development finance side by side with the European Union’s (EU) market-led, public-private partnership-oriented strategies, especially within Europe’s own neighborhood. Additionally, the literature insufficiently explains why development institutions (agents) would act geo-economically to enforce their most powerful member states’ (principals) international agendas. This lack of theoretical explanatory power poses a serious puzzle. Thus, we ask, how has EU and Chinese institutional investment cooperation developed (legally and financially) in the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) region in the previous EU Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) from 2014 to 2020? We argue that development institutions have acted in accordance with their principal’s policy goals by facilitating investment and institutional agreements and by offering beneficial cooperation conditions, so that the EU and China can direct investment in a geo-economic manner if they choose to do so. In the following, we find that European investment in the EaP countries Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, has been huge in absolute terms (amount invested) and strong in relative terms––through deeper economic cooperation––when compared to Chinese investment activity in the same countries. This development supports the EU’s aim of countering China’s increasing economic presence in the region. However, we find that this gap has been closing in total terms. Our study suggests that while China has not matched EU investment in the EaP region for the previous MFF, further research is needed to unpack individual sectors and their geo-economic implications for official development institutions and their respective states.