Despite populist backlash against globalization in advanced industrialized countries, developing countries have recently sought to liberalize trade. To shed light on this phenomenon, we investigate mass attitudes toward free trade in thirty-six African countries. Using two rounds of Afrobarometer data and original survey data from Ghana and Uganda, we find that individuals hold views that are consistent with their economic self-interest. As factor endowment models predict for a sample of skill-scarce countries, low-skilled individuals are more likely than high-skilled individuals to support free trade. Moreover, the strongest negative effects of skill occur for the most skill-scarce countries in the sample and are driven by individuals in the labor force. Our results are robust to measuring variables more precisely in original surveys and controlling for other factors thought to shape attitudes. The findings indicate that previous evidence against factor endowment models may have partially resulted from inadequate data from the developing world.

The new politics of modernization in post-Mao China raises a variety of intriguing questions to ask and hypotheses to test in international relations research. This paper examines the normative and policy changes brought about by the impetus of the modernization drive at home and how these changes have affected Chinese foreign policy in general and Chinese global policy in particular. In pursuit of this line of inquiry, the institutional setting of international organizations, especially those concerned with global political, military, developmental, and functional issues, is chosen as a testing ground of Chinese global policy. The scope of the paper is largely limited to the Chinese global policy of the post-Mao period of 1977 - 1980. The paper attempts a normative-behavioral analysis concentrating on global geopolitical, developmental, and functional domains. By way of conclusion, the paper broadly assesses the implications of post-Mao Chinese global policy for the Third World's elusive pursuit of a new world order.

In analyzing the future of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), it is useful to assess both the centrifugal and centripetal forces affecting regional economic integration. Centrifugal forces include the existing structure of production in Eastern Europe; problems of coordination; and inefficient price systems, among others. Centripetal forces include the worldwide energy crisis; Western inflation and recession; the growing importance of trade blocs; and numerous other factors contributing to the increasing hard-currency indebtedness of the Eastern European countries. Many of these external events have increased the attractiveness for CMEA countries of intrabloc economic relations and provided a momentum for CMEA integration. Analysis of the various forces leads to the conclusion that Soviet economic policy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe will remain crucial in determining the direction and speed of economic integration. Soviet economic involvement with Eastern Europe seems to have been costly for the USSR during the past decade and so it is not obvious that the USSR will attempt to push integration much further than it now stands.

The United Nations Charter states that, in building the Secretariat, the Secretary General must give “paramount consideration” to achieving “the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity”, and adds that he must recruit “on as wide a geographical basis as possible”. A dozen years have passed since these standards were set down at San Francisco, and in those years two Secretaries General have attempted to apply them. In their efforts to create a professional civil service, they have had to face extraordinarily difficult problems, but it is clear that the Secretariat today largely fulfills the expectations of the Charter

As periodic stock–taking efforts would indicate,1 students of international organizations have become increasingly sophisticated in the methods and techniques used for assessing the dynamics of international efforts at cooperation, and the impact of these efforts on the general stream of international politics. Nowhere has this been more true than in attempts by scholars to come to grips with the political processes acted out in the General Assembly of the United Nations. To para–phrase Keohane,2 we have come to witness a change of focus from a somewhat static description of structures, rules and regulations, to analyses of patterns of voting behavior (and correlates thereof) to, finally, systematic analyses of patterns of interactions leading to votes and resolutions.

The problem of squaring the circle is not confined to mathematics. A somewhat similar task confronts the members of the Organization of American States (OAS) as they seek to enlarge respect for human rights and to create a firmer basis for democratic institutions in the life of the western hemisphere while maintaining the treasured principle of non-intervention. Not a new problem, it has increased in urgency in the last few years with the mounting opposition to dictatorships throughout the continent, with the increasingly communist orientation of Castro's government in Cuba, and with the political unrest elsewhere in Latin America to which Castro's victory appears to have contributed. Faced somewhat obliquely at the Sixth and Seventh Meetings of Foreign Ministers in Costa Rica in August 1960, it will have to be confronted more directly at the Eleventh International Conference of American States to be held in Ecuador in May 1961. The agenda for the Eleventh Conference contains items relating both to the protection of human rights and to the preservation of representative democracy.

In 1968, just ten years after the ill-fated West Indies Federation had been established, Caribbean regional integration was re-launched with the creation of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA). By 1974, the twelve Commonwealth Caribbean member countries had adhered to the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) which had evolved out of CARIFTA. This progress in the evolution of Caribbean integration stopped with the failure to adopt the Draft Agreement on Foreign Investment and Development of Technology, and since that time regional negotiations have been undermined by conflicts over intraregional trade and bilateral arrangements at the expense of regional cooperation. Analysis of the politics of regional negotiations in the Caribbean provides an interesting example of the process of integration among developing countries.

A valuable source of data for the international organization researcher is interviews with delegates sent by their governments to participate in international conferences and meetings. With the appearance of many newly independent states in the 1960s and early 1970s, the size of international conferences and the workload of the individual delegate have grown to such an extent that it has become difficult to tap this resource effectively.

At the present time, the political popularity of foreign assistance, both bilateral and multilateral, has reached a low point in the United States. The lack of enthusiasm is epitomized by the vote of the House of Representatives in January 1974 against the United States's pledge of $550 million to support the International Development Association (IDA), the soft-loan subsidiary of the World Bank (even though that vote was subsequently reversed). Total US commitments of official development assistance have declined from 0.59 percent of GNP in 1963 to 0.29 percent in 1972.

Any act of battlefield violence results from a combination of organizational strategy and a combatant's personal motives. To measure the relative contribution of each, our research design leverages the predictable effect of ambient temperature on human aggression. Using fine-grained data collected by US forces during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, we test whether temperature and violence are linked for attacks that can be initiated by individual combatants, but not for those requiring organizational coordination. To distinguish alternative explanations involving temperature effects on target movements, we examine situations where targets are stationary. We find that when individual combatants have discretion over the initiation of violence, ambient temperature does shape battlefield outcomes. There is no such effect when organizational coordination is necessary. We also find that ambient temperature affects combat-age males’ endorsement of insurgent violence in a survey taken during the conflict in Iraq. Our findings caution against attributing strategic causes to violence and encourage research into how strategic and individual-level motivations interact in conflict.

The study of integration provides a seemingly endless variety of theories, frameworks, approaches, definitions, terminology, and methodologies. An unfortunate consequence of this profusion and confusion is that research findings exhibit the same variety. For instance, studies of integration within the European Economic Community (EEC) can easily be divided into two types: those that find integration progressing steadily and even rapidly and those that find it stagnant.

The relationship between international organization and developing countries is one of interdependence: developing countries place hope in disinterested help through international agencies; and the needs of the developing world provide stimulus to the expansion of international organization. Yet these two contemporaneous processes of political development—the growth of international organization and nation building in developing areas—may not always be in step. Education is a convenient viewpoint from which to examine this relationship, with its element of discord and of convergence of interest. Education is a prominent aspiration of governments and people in developing countries and is widely considered to be a most efficacious instrument for modernization. This subject-matter limitation also makes it possible to focus on two international organizations: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the agency primarily responsible for educational systems; and the International Labor Organization (ILO) because of its recent emphasis both on training in occupational skills and on the relevancy of the manpower factor for educational policy.

Eight journals were surveyed for articles reporting empirical research on international organizations, under the assumption that periodic self-assessment is a necessary component of any program of scientific inquiry. Forty-five article published between 1970 and 1975 are compared to articles from the 1960s on a variety of dimensions. In the recent period more authors view international organizations comparatively while fewer concentrate their efforts on the UN. The types of organizations and organizational process being studied have become more diversified, as have the research methods being utilized. Several questions receiving the sustained attention of researchers, such as studies of UN voting groups, the attributes of UN member states, the effects of economic assistance on influence in the UN, and the role of IO's in conflict resolution, all reflect a growing accumulation of knowledge about international organizations.

International organization of aid presents two basic difficulties: 1) Major economic development aid should best be conceived as a supplement to total national development effort, not to single parts of it. This means that a program approach rather than a project approach should be applied in financing. Only a program can show whether projects are additional and optimal. While every program must be spelled out in projects, the sum total of individually worked out projects will not add up to a program.

The diverse interests of donors and the desires of recipients to shop for the best deals mean that coordination of projects in international assistance causes problems along with promises of greater efficiency. Evidence from East Africa indicates that political competition and lack of candor and comparability in donors' reports limit the effectiveness of efforts at donor coordination. On the other hand, the policies of Kenya and the East African Community permitting virtual autonomy to profitable public corporations in their dealings with foreign governments and businessmen compromise the opportunity to optimize the use of assistance available in a multi-donor situation.

The governments of the five major Western powers—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Japan—coordinated policy on two key North-South issues from 1974 to 1979: relieving the external debts of developing nations and establishing the Common Fund to help finance international commodity agreements. A prominent feature of the coordination process was the emergence of transgovernmental coalitions among like-minded bureaucrats. Previous studies have suggested that such coalitions may affect national policies by promoting learning and attitude change in their members and by legitimizing the policy changes sought by their members. But these suggestions do not account for the ability of coalitions to translate their policy preferences into national policy commitments, particularly where one or more of their members are relatively weak in their national policy-making systems. On the Common Fund and debt relief, some coalition members held positions in their national systems strong enough to induce their governments as a whole to commit themselves to certain concessions. Weaker members of these coalitions then gained the external support they needed to lead their own governments to make similar commitments, thus preparing the way for agreements with the developing countries and some incremental changes in the international economic order.

Since 1975, the United Nations has undertaken major deliberations to consider institutional reform of the UN system. Such restructuring activities have sprung from widespread dissatisfaction with the United Nations' capacity to deal with problems of economic development and relations between industrialized and developing countries. UN reform efforts have focused on two broad areas: reshaping the deliberative and policy-making operations of central UN institutions in order to reach more coherent global policies on international economic and social affairs; and reorganizing the planning, coordination, and implementation of UN programs to achieve these policy goals more effectively. In 1977, the General Assembly adopted the report of an intergovernmental Ad Hoc Committee, which provided detailed guidelines for prospective UN restructuring, and assigned its recommendations to relevant units within the UN system for the purpose of implementing these reforms. Major themes emphasized in these guidelines include an increased centralization and integration of the UN system in dealing with international economic and social affairs and improved efficiency and coordination of UN operations and activities in these areas. Fundamental to the course of UN restructuring deliberations—and to the extent and significance of eventual institutional reforms—has been the linkage between UN reorganization and the disposition of substantive North-South issues, as the restructuring exercise remains tied to the pace and direction of negotiations concerning “a new international economic order.”