Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Achieving And Maintaining Food Security In The Prc: The Impact On Foreign Policy, Paul D. Rittenhouse

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the People’s Republic of China has used domestic and foreign policy to achieve and maintain food security. This is a formidable task for the PRC given that it has 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of its arable land. It has been made more formidable by domestic policy errors and its changing position within the international system.

The PRC has evolved from a Marxist revisionist state to one that mixes state capitalism and free enterprise and has become a combination of revisionist and status quo. Such changes lend …

Three Essays On International And Intranational Trade And Economic Growth, Rooholah Hadadi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation introduced a method to construct a new measure for trade flows within a region using nighttime lights. After analyzing the relation between lights data and other proxies of economic human activity, I employed light data and econometric techniques to estimate the bilateral trade between any two regions around the world. Using these estimations, I estimated the overall internal trade volume for all countries. Moreover, I estimated the effect of internal trade within a state of the United States on the state’s income. The first essay proposed nighttime lights as an alternative proxy for economic activity to be used …

Income Distribution, International Trade And Foreign Direct Investment With Heterogeneous Firms, Feifei Wang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the factors that firms take into consideration when they decide in which manner to expand internationally (i.e. foreign direct investment and international trade). Another component of the investigation focuses on what types of firms benefit the most and what are the associated benefits with expanding internationally.

I investigate self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypothesis by applying matched sampling techniques and non-structural econometric models. Using a Chinese firm-level dataset, I find that firms that start exporting are more productive than non-exporting ones. Additionally, in most industries exporters become more productive in time.

I then investigate how income inequality leads firms …

Economic Aspects Of Climate Change Adaptation And Natural Hazard Risk Mitigation, Sisi Meng

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Munich Re (2013), economic losses related to natural disasters have increased from an average of $50 billion in the 1980s to $200 billion over the last decade. The cost of natural disasters is accumulating rapidly and some claim that climate change is responsible. Others believe that human behaviors like population growth or land use should be blamed for these rising costs. The process of climate change has already taken place, and it is expected to continue to impact the future. As a result, people are more vulnerable today. Therefore, understanding the economic aspects of climate change and natural …

Transnational Capitalism And The Middle East: Understanding The Transnational Elites Of The Gulf Cooperation Council, Seyed Ahmad Mirtaheri

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that transnational elites within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have been integrated within a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) economically, militarily and politically through relationships that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. These relationships exist within the context of a global capitalist structure of accumulation that is dependent on the maintenance of a repressive state apparatus in the GCC. There have been few attempts to analyze the relationships that Middle Eastern political and economic elites have developed with global elite networks. This work fills an important gap in the scholarly literature by linking the political and …

Essays On Retail And Regional Economics, David Christopher Vitt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays at the intersection of regional economic analysis and industrial organization. In the first chapter, I derive an estimating equation for retail market structure in order to quantify the effects of e-commerce competition on brick and mortar retail establishment and employment counts. Using a multilevel regression specification, I find that (i) e-commerce establishment count exposure results show heterogeneity in the sign of the effects across the retail sectors represented in the data (ii) the magnitude of the e-commerce exposure effect is also heterogeneous across retail sectors (iii) the heterogeneity is not purely random and …