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Competency Allocation And Institutional Revenue: Political And Economic Analysis Of Institutional Change In The Asia - Pacific Region After The Cold War

Posted on:2016-10-31Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:C C YeFull Text:PDF
GTID:1106330461966109Subject:World Economy
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
As the systemic change of international order after the Cold War, regional order in Asia Pacific had also been changed. When facing the different consideration of profit of institutions, major powers will have different policies. This dissertation will answer these major questions:1) what is the feature of institutional change in Asia Pacific after the Cold War? 2) What factors determine the institutional change? 3) What is the feature of the major power games and how they shape regional institutions? 4) Why the same institution develops different in different periods and different institutions develop different in the same period?The main hypothesis of this dissertation is that the major powers behaviors in institution construction depend on capacity distribution of regional system which refers to the survival and security pressure induced by the relative position of a country in a regional system and their cognition of profit of regional institutions. This dissertation adopts these two independent variables to explain the dependent variable, regional institutional change in Asia Pacific. Profit of institutions and capacity distribution affect the major powers behaviors in institutional games which promote regional institutional change.This dissertation, in the perspective of capacity and profit change of the struggle between China and U.S, divides institutional change into three periods which argues that China has experienced from the process of integration, participation and leading area system, while the United States has experienced a process of construction, respectively is ignored and the Asia Pacific rebalancing. Each period also has three steps, namely the institution demand, institution game and system maintenance. In order to test my hypothesis, the qualitative approaches of structured focused on comparison and process tracing are applied, and three cases are discussed respectively: 1) Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and ASEAN Regional Forum in 1990s; 2) the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) and APEC during the of the war on terror from 2001 to 2008; and 3) the America leading TPP and the hedging institutions found by China after the global financial crisis.The major findings of this study are as follows:l)The first period was a unipolar system, China and the United States had a strong willing to promote the regional institutional, but Chinese and ASEAN were not willing to be USA dominant, so the result of the game was to form a weakly constrained institution named "open regionalism".2) The second period was still unipolar, the US willing of institution supply declined while China showed more interest in it, but without sufficient power, the outcome of the was the stagnation of US-led APEC and setbacks of China-led APT.3) The last period was a bipolar system, due to Sino-US balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, the United States had more incentive to promote regional institution which was more exclusive and valued relative gains after Obama’s rebalancing strategy. After the relative rise of Chinese power, China had taken a more aggressive posture to found a series of institutions to hedge it. So the result of the game is the balance of power between the US and China.The theoretical contribution of this dissertation lies in three aspects. First, it uses capacity distribution and institution profit to explain the regional institutional change and divide institutional change into three phases to avoid the paradigm debate between different schools. Second, it distinguishes state actors and result in regional regimes, and adopts game theory to explain the relationship between the behavior of a national policy and as a result of institutional change. And finally, beyond static analysis of the variables, this study provides a historical institutionalism perspective to understand the regional institutional change.In conclusion, under the framework of Neo-liberal institutionalism, this dissertation reveals the change of capacity distribution and institution profit between hegemony power and the rising power. It also uses game theory to investigate the effect of these changes on the power behaviors and game results and therefore enriches the analysis about the regional institutional change.
Keywords/Search Tags:capacity distribution, institution profit, regional institution, institutional change, major power games
PDF Full Text Request
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