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Are there any institutional features that increase the likelihood of a significant component of military and covert intervention in US foreign policy?
There are three institutional factors to discuss – the proliferation of US military bases abroad, US training of foreign militaries and pressure from the defense industry.
The US maintains a large number of […]

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Through which institutions are these interests able to have disproportionate influence on foreign policy?
(This post follows on from the discussion in Part 1 of this four part series)
This is a matter of the means by which a special interest group X identified in Part 1 can influence the relevant foreign policy makers in the US […]

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A military or an intelligence agency embodies a concentration of power. At times, concentrations of power and their deployment may be necessary. However, a cautionary acknowledgement is that there is a potential for concentrations of power being used for unjust purposes. I take it to be an uncontroversial precautionary principle that we should bind concentrations […]

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[The one year anniversary is fast approaching for the media-grabbing arrests of October 15 2007. In connection with that, here is an article written around that time (almost a year ago) summarising some of the issues. The article originally appeared at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0711/S00330.htm and appears here with the author’s permission]
The Solicitor-General’s decision
On the 29th of Oct, […]

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The IMF and WB launched the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative in 1996 to reduce the debt burden of bilateral and multilateral debt for some of the poorest and most heavily indebted countries. Forty one countries are eligible for debt relief under the program. Another program, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, was launched in 2005 […]

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There are some specific historical factors behind the large debt of developing countries today. Let me note some of these.
Several factors in the 1970s contributed to a substantial rise in sovereign debts owed by developing countries. Non-oil producing developing countries experienced a rising overall trade deficit. The largest share of this deficit was due to […]

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Types of lenders and of loans in sovereign borrowing
The external debt burden of a country is the money owed by private debtors (companies) and by the government to foreign creditors. Roughly 62% of external debt in 2004 was owed publicly and 38% owed privately (CADTM 2005). There are various reasons why a government will borrow. […]

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By Bumbu
A developing country’s policy to promote development rests on many factors. One factor is the economic arguments for and against the policy. This comes up often in debates about whether developing countries should be liberalising their economies and committing to free trade or not. Another important factor is the domestic political situation. Here I describe a […]

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This is a sumamry of Francisco Rodriguez and Dani Rodrik’s 1999 paper, “Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic’s guide to Cross-National Evidence”, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is available in full at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7081
 
Several recent studies have investigated the systematic relation between growth and trade or growth and liberalization using empirical […]

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