Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
Refine
Year of publication
- 2019 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- no (3) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3) (remove)
01/2019
This dissertation presents a comparative qualitative analysis on the determinants of provincial outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in China. During the last decade, China’s OFDI turned into a provincial phenomenon. In 2015, 97 percent of Chinese investors came from provinces and municipalities with only ten provinces and municipalities accounting for more than 60 percent of China’s total OFDI flow. These provincial investors tend to be private companies, often of small and medium size, accounting sometimes for more than 70 percent of the officially approved investment projects of a province in a given year. While mainstream theory of OFDI suggests, that foreign investors need certain advantages when they engage in overseas projects, these provincial investors are often distinct; unlike large central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they are often confronted with financial constraints, difficulties to access relevant information, and lack international experience. However, they are able to invest in distant regions that lack political stability and good infrastructure as well as in regions that have strong international competitors. This dissertation asks: Why do some Chinese provinces have such high OFDI, despite their investors often facing multiple impediments?
Whereas previous research considered the determinants for Chinese OFDI mostly through a firm-level lens of motivations enriching it with institutional theory, few studies step up to the provincial level. This research argues that a combination of provincial path dependencies, provincial institutional configurations and multiple actors’ interests can explain the phenomenon at hand. While path dependencies offer insights into conducive initial conditions that provide a basis for provincial OFDI patterns and growth, provincial formal and informal institutional configurations can explain how enterprises are able to reduce their additional costs and risks associated with foreign investment activities. Finally, provincial interests by bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic actors explain the emergence of these institutional configurations. These have developed due to strategic-alignment of OFDI policies with provincial economic conditions, and as a side effect of other revenue-seeking non-political and foreign actors, who are present in these provinces.
Designed as an inductive endeavour, this dissertation bases results on fieldwork with 66 interviews in two provinces, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as Chinese primary sources. It addresses a gap in and offers an alternative perspective to the literature on the determinants of Chinese OFDI. It also contributes to the literature on spatial variation and provincial policy-making and implementation in China, which has not studied the case of OFDI so far. In theoretical terms, it discusses the limitations of the distinction between and the blurriness of formal and informal institutional configurations at the given case. On most abstract terms, this research contends that China’s global integration into the world economy is far from being an overall trend. Instead, it should be understood as a spatially uneven phenomenon with some provinces and regions being not only more integrated than others, but being a major force behind this process.
06/2018
To what extent do regime classifications help us understand higher education funding by foundations vis-à-vis the state? This dissertation investigates the explanatory value of three prominent regime classifications – Varieties of Capitalism, Three Worlds of Welfare, and Social Origins theory – for understanding higher education foundations in two regime types: the liberal
United States as well as corporatist Germany. The analysis shows that the classifications do indeed provide a good starting point since they enable us to draw conclusions about the country and activity field level. However, the analysis also shows that they meet their limits when philanthropic foundations are added to the picture since the classifications are not specific enough to correctly predict foundation behavior. The typology proposed in this study suggests that foundations can be placed on a continuum between funding through higher education to reach other aims and funding of higher education for its own sake. The place of foundations on the continuum is different in the sense that the rather market-oriented, liberal US foundations are more likely to support other aims through higher education, while the rather stateoriented,
corporatist-conservative German foundations more often want to support higher education for its own sake.
This study draws upon a range of both quantitative and qualitative data: German and American data sets including university funding statistics, 40 qualitative foundation vignettes, a representative survey of 1,004 German foundations, one focus group, and 49 semi-structured expert interviews conducted on-site.
One of the study’s major contributions is that it refines the regime classifications by considering the understudied role of independent, philanthropic foundations supporting the advancement of higher education. Furthermore, it establishes the first link between regime types and higher education literature by way of philanthropic foundations. As there is growing discussion in Germany and the US about private engagement versus public funding in higher education, the results ultimately have contemporary relevance for understanding the topic in a comparative manner.
07/2019
EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration
(2019)
European internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well.
Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation.
This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration.