Ideas in international political economy : the liberalization of trade in services

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dc.contributor.authorWilliams, Russell Alanen_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-15T20:17:03Z
dc.date.available2024-08-15T20:17:03Z
dc.date.copyright1997en_US
dc.date.issued1997
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Political Scienceen_US
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en
dc.description.abstractThis thesis contends that in the process by which the liberalization of trade in services became institutionalized in the Final Text of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), analysis must include consideration of the role of internationally-disseminated ideas. Currently, structural approaches which reduce all consideration to actors' functionally­ determined material interests dominate the study of international trade agreements. Such approaches, which assume that rising support for trade liberalization is a simple consequence of the globalization of actors' interests, cannot explain the movement towards the GATS due to the overall low level of globalization in the service economy. As such, the author proposes to test the utility of Transnational Historical Materialism and the epistemic communities approaches, which both include consideration of the causality of ideas, as guides to the trade in services story. While the evidence suggests the importance of internationally-disseminated ideas in this process and the unworkability of narrowly-structuralist theories, conclusions as to the usefulness of the two ideational approaches is necessarily more tentative. While the epistemic communities approach is hampered by its failure to theorize the contestable and normative nature of ideas, the approach does provide several useful concepts. Transnational Historical Materialism is hampered by its generality as a theorization of international political economy, however, its emphasis on international class formation and the role of ideas in that formation do provide important insights into the trade in services story.
dc.format.extent177 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/20139
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.titleIdeas in international political economy : the liberalization of trade in servicesen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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