National Sovereignty in an Interdependent World

Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger

No 10249, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: What are the sovereign rights of nations in an interdependent world, and to what extent do these rights stand in the way of achieving important international objectives? These two questions rest at the heart of contemporary debate over the role and design of international institutions as well as growing tension between globalization and the preservation of national sovereignty. In this paper, we propose answers to these two questions. We do so by first developing formal definitions of national sovereignty that capture features of sovereignty emphasized in the political science literature. We then utilize these definitions to describe the degree and nature of national sovereignty possessed by governments in a benchmark (Nash) world in which there exist no international agreements of any kind. And with national sovereignty characterized in this benchmark world, we then evaluate the extent to which national sovereignty is compromised by international agreements with specific design features. In this way, we delineate the degree of tension between national sovereignty and international objectives and describe how that tension can be minimized and in principle at times even eliminated through careful institutional design.

JEL-codes: F1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-01
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10249.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: National sovereignty in an interdependent world (2003)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10249

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10249

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().