Byung-Won Woo

The article explores how International Monetary Fund (IMF) program design influences foreign direct investment inflows. The author argues that stricter IMF conditionality signals a program-participating government's commitment to economic reforms, as it incurs larger ex ante political cost and risks greater ex post political cost. Thus, the catalytic effect of an IMF program is conditional on conditionality: programs with stricter conditions catalyze more foreign direct investment than those wit

Does a country’s abuse of human rights influence its ability to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund? We examine whether human rights conditions matter for the likelihood that a country participates in an International Monetary Fund program. We argue that human rights conditions are unlikely to be enough by themselves to influence International Monetary Fund decision-making; there are simply too many countries with poor human rights conditions that are under economic distress. Instead

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support i

How do International Monetary Fund programs and conditions affect labor rights? Recognizing the diversity of International Monetary Fund conditionality, we argue that the more stringent International Monetary Fund labor market conditionality is, the worse labor rights become. However, this negative effect can be mitigated if there exist domestic political institutions that have incentives and abilities to provide protections over workers: one such case is a closed-list proportional representatio

What effect do economic sanctions have on the IMF lending decisions? Though countries under economic sanctions often face significant economic and financial difficulties, no comprehensive research to date has explored whether the IMF as a de facto lender of last resort intervenes in those countries in need. We posit that economic coercion is likely to hinder the target’s access to IMF credits as sanctioning (sender) countries are likely to use their political influence in the IMF to deny funds t

This article first reviews and compares Human Rights Council and University Period Review (HRC/UPR) research published during and shortly after the institution-building period (2006–2009) to more recent work (2010–2014) to identify patterns of scholarly interest in NGO roles and behavior at the HRC/UPR. It divides research into that which either “ignores” NGOs or offers “indirect” attention, “direct” attention, or “foregrounds” NGO activity, concluding that NGOs are surprisingly underexamined, g

Why do some IMF programs contain more conditions than others? In this paper, I offer a theoretical account of under what circumstances competing domestic political logics prevails over the other and explain why some IMF programs contain more conditions than others. The theoretical model shows that the effect of domestic politics on IMF program design depends on the interaction of three institutional parameters: sensitivity to vote losses; reform-mindedness of the government; and the strength of

Which countries are middle powers in international relations? While the term “middle powers” has witnessed a steady increase in its use in the past two decades, answers to the question are likely to be diverse, depending on to whom one asks the question. The paper tries to provide objective criteria that would allow one to define the entire population of middle powers and theorize how different types of middle powers are regarded and treated by other countries, most significantly, by great power

We examine the global determinants of the illicit international narcotics trade and the specific roles that states play in it, a topic understudied by international relations scholars. We develop the first comprehensive global data set of state involvement in international narcotics trafficking and then use the data set to empirically test hypotheses concerning the likelihood of countries to serve as transit states for the transshipment of illicit drugs. We find that more-globalized countries ar

How does official development assistance (ODA) affect women’s rights in aid-receiving countries? We argue that ODA allows those donor countries who have more respect for women’s rights and who have the intention of spreading the norm of gender equality to successfully influence recipient countries, and thus improve women’s rights in aid-recipient countries. We argue that this is possible because aid is equipped with technical assistance, donor conditionality, and donor-recipient collaborative pr

Abstract How do investors respond when a country participates in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme? While there exists some optimism in and around the IMF on the catalytic effect of a Fund programme, empirical research on the catalytic finance reports rather diverse findings; contrary to most theoretical research, empirical studies report both positive and negative effects as well as null effects. This paper revisits the question of whether and how an IMF programme catalyses other f