Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Course Description

This graduate class is designed as a PhD-level overview of international political economy (IPE), with an emphasis on the advanced industrial countries. The syllabus is divided into three sections: international trade; international monetary and financial relations (including foreign direct investment); and security.

Course Objectives

An important goal of the course is to use economic theories to identify the welfare effects, distributional consequences, and security implications of foreign economic policy decisions, and to use the tools of political science to analyze how interest groups, voters, political parties, electoral institutions, ideas, and power politics interact to shape policy outcomes. It is my hope that this course will generate ideas for your own research, leading to publishable papers and dissertation topics.

Course Requirements

Students are expected to read each article or chapter on the syllabus closely, and to come to class prepared to discuss and critique the readings. Additional requirements include:

1. Four reaction papers (2-3 pages in length), each of which critiques a week's readings. Reaction papers are due at the beginning of class, and retroactive papers (which discuss the prior week's readings) are not permitted.
   
2. A 15-page research proposal on a topic related to international political economy. The proposal should identify a research puzzle, situate that puzzle in the relevant literature, and offer a theory with testable hypotheses to explain the puzzle. A one-page prospectus is due anytime before Ses #7. The research proposal is due four days after Ses #12.
   
3. A presentation of your research proposal in class in Ses #11 and #12.

Grading

Evaluation for the course will be based on class participation, the reaction papers, and the research proposal (including presentation).

Readings

Readings are available through the library's online journal holdings; a complete list of readings can be found in the readings section. In addition, please purchase the following two books at Amazon.com or your local bookstore:

Frieden, Jeffry A. Global capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2006. ISBN: 9780393058086.

Mosley, Layna. Global Capital and National Governments. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780521521628.

Students are encouraged to consult a good international economics textbook such as Caves, Frankel, and Jones, World Trade and Payments or Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics. Accessible discussions of many of the economic theories discussed in the readings can be found in Joseph Grieco and John Ikenberry, State Power and World Markets (New York: Norton, 2003) and Thomas Oatley, International Political Economy (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006). And finally, an excellent reference on the history of international monetary relations is Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital (Princeton University Press, 1996). Please see readings for more details about these recommended texts.

Calendar