This is a survey course for doctoral students interested in the study of International Political Economy (which is a subfield of both the International Relations field and the Political Economy fields and overlaps with Comparative Political Economy). IPE covers a wide range of subjects. It includes the study of how global markets and economic connections (via trade, FDI, capital flows, aid, and remittances) shape global politics or domestic politics/policy, or how global political arrangements such as intergovernmental and private regimes shape domestic politics and policy. Scholars also reverse the independent variables and dependent variables and study how domestic factors shape national-level responses to global/regional regimes, etc. And of course, we can throw in the interactions of domestic and international factors to explain the dependent variable of our choice. The range of issue areas covered by scholars is also impressive – from traditional suspects such as regimes, trade, finance, foreign aid, to newer suspects such as policy, diffusion, environmental issues, labor, and human rights. Scholars increasingly (and thankfully) examine both state and nonstate actors in the study of IPE. In terms of methods, while statistical techniques (specifically, cross sectional time-series) tend to dominate, there are a fair number of case studies, survey work, formal models, and increasingly, field experiments.
Given the complexity of the field, my objective is to expose you to important concepts and themes in IPE. This would allow you to assess the state of the art and identify specific issues you wish to examine in more depth and detail in your work. Importantly, this course seeks to prepare you for the IR and PE comprehensive exams.