This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), if successful, will eliminate trade barriers between the US and the EU, both of which already have free trade agreements with many other countries, including several that are in FTAs with both (Canada, Korea, Mexico to name just a few).  Is TTIP therefore achieving true free trade with this larger group?  No. Restrictive rules of origin apply, and these can potentially interfere with trade and reduce welfare even when compared to a world without any of these FTAs.

Alan V. Deardorff is John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.  With a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, he has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1970, where he has served as Chair of Economics and now Associate Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.  His research has included both contributions to the theory of international trade and, with Robert M. Stern, development of the Michigan Model of World Production of Trade, used for analysis of multi-country, multi-sector changes in trade policy.

The process of joining an IO may cause liberalization before membership. Thus studies that only evaluate compliance after membership underestimate the effects. Conditional membership may be one of the most important sources of leverage for IOs.  The rule-makers establish rules that don't go far beyond what they would otherwise do, but rule-takers often must accept a broad range of policy reforms they would not otherwise consider. The influence of accession conditions has been studied in the context of EU and NATO, where sizeable benefits and formal conditions motivate major concessions by applicants. This paper proposes to examine a much less powerful organization, the OECD. Here the qualifications for membership are ambiguous and leave open room for informal pressure for a range of economic reforms. The politics of joining organizations touch closely on concerns about status and legitimacy as well as functional demands for cooperation in complex issue areas. I will examine how OECD membership has motivated specific reforms in regulatory policies and trade in a comparison of the East European transition economies accession with that of Japan, Mexico, and Korea. Statistical analysis of patterns of when countries apply for membership will test for the role of economic and political conditions as well as the political relations among members.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

Virtually non-existent five years ago, Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Europe has surged spectacularly in recent years in an international context of declining FDI globally. While the stock of Chinese investment in Europe is still minuscule, the flows show an explosion in the interest of Chinese companies in being present in Europe, both through greenfield investment and through mergers and acquisitions. This surge occurred concomitantly to the explosion of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and the general economic downturn in many countries of the European Union (EU). This paper asks how the European crisis contributed to the surge of Chinese FDI in Europe. In particular, did this surge occur as a result of an explicit strategy formulated by governments in EU Member States in order to dig their countries out of the crisis? The main argument is that the crisis has provided Chinese investors with two types of bargains: economic bargains due to depressed prices and a greater number of assets for sale, and political bargains due to the lessened political resistance to deals that may have been objectionable in flusher times.

Sophie Meunier is Research Scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and Co-Director of the EU Program at Princeton. She is the author of Trading Voices: The European Union in International Commercial Negotiations (Princeton University Press, 2005)  and co-author of The French Challenge: Adapting to Globalization (with Philip Gordon, Brookings Institution Press, 2001), winner of the 2002 France-Ameriques book award. She is also the editor of several books on Europe and globalization. Her current work deals with the politics of hosting Chinese investment in Europe. Meunier contributes regularly to the French and American media. She is Chevalier des Palmes Academiques.

Co-sponsored by the the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center