This article analyses the determinants of asylum migration to Western Europe. Potential asylum seekers balance the costs of staying versus the costs of migrating. Estimation results confirm that economic hardship and economic discrimination against ethnic minorities leads to higher flows of...

This article reviews existing linkages between the two broad concepts of human development and sustainability and discusses ways in which the often separate literatures can learn from each other. It proposes a practical way in which the measurements of human development and sustainability can be...

The vast majority of states impose visa restrictions on travellers from some foreign countries. Such restrictions are likely to deter foreign visitors from affected countries. They will therefore reduce the flow of tourists, businesspeople and other travellers and thereby damage a country’s...

Over the past two decades, Western political leaders have scripted a more ethical foreign policy, wherein far greater weight is given to protecting the rights and freedoms of extra-territorial citizens. Using the example of arms exports to developing countries, the present paper exposes the...

Political units often spatially depend in their policy choices on other units. This also holds in dyadic settings where, as in much of international relations research, the focus of the analysis is the pair or dyad of two political units. Yet, with few exceptions, social scientists have analyzed...

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. We develop a political theory of famine mortality based on the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002, 2003). We argue that it can be politically rational for a government, democratic or not, to remain...

The ‘California effect’ hypothesis posits that economic integration may lead to the ratcheting upwards of regulatory standards towards levels found in higher-regulating jurisdictions. Although a number of previous large sample quantitative studies have investigated such convergence dynamics...

This article tests the hypothesis that higher women’s economic and social rights in foreign countries with which a country is connected via trade and FDI spill-over into higher rights among the laggards — a phenomenon known as spatial dependence. Analyzing women’s rights over the period...

One cannot expect developing countries to have the same environmental standards as developed ones. Standards can be at their efficiency levels and yet be lower than in developed countries due to differences in emissions, in the pollution absorptive capacity and in the intensity of environmental...