Course Archive

The course is a limited survey of international macroeconomics. The topics covered should provide a foundation for going on to the frontiers of research in international macroeconomics.

Comparative Sociology of Contemporary Capitalism
Jonathan Zeitlin, UW-Madison Professor of Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science, and History

This course will review recent comparative research and debates on “varieties of capitalism”, concentrating on the so-called “triad” regions of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Are there distinct national models or family types of capitalism across these regions? How far and in what ways do developed capitalist economies differ from one another in their social organization, institutional embeddedness, and modes of governance? What are the implications of such differences for industrial specialization, technological innovation, and economic performance in a competitive world market? How tightly coupled and mutually supportive/constraining are the different domains and institutional structures within advanced capitalist societies, from product, capital, and labor markets to corporate governance, education and training, employment relations, and social welfare provision? Are current processes of globalization and regionalization eroding the coherence and distinctiveness of national economies? In tackling such questions, this course will combine a comparative approach with an analysis of interdependence between competing systems, as well as a discussion of tendencies towards convergence and/or divergence.

Contemporary Topics in Technology Entrepreneurship
Anne Miner, UW-Madison Distinguished Professor, Management & Human Resources, School of Business

The introductory course focuses on the tools, information and concepts needed to understand how to generate value from technology.

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Economic Growth in Southeast Asia
Ian Coxhead, UW-Madison Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics

This course evaluates economic development strategies in Southeast Asia and their implications for growth, distribution and the environment. Students learn theoretic essentials in the areas of economic growth, international trade and development as well as acquiring specific knowledge of Southeast Asian economic development experience.

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Globalization and Human Security
Jeremi Suri, UW-Madison Associate Professor of History
Clark Miller , UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
Leila Harris, UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Geography

The Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) and the Global Environmental Studies Research Circle is currently holding a cross-disciplinary fall research seminar for faculty and graduate students interested in globalization and its implications for human security and insecurity.

In many parts of the world, globalization has contributed to new and emerging patterns of human insecurity. This seminar is designed to explore and deliberate on these connections, examining the dynamics of new threats to human welfare, health, and wellbeing and their relationship to the global expansion of markets, technologies, violence, migration, and environmental degradation. Our focus this semester begins with readings from background papers written for the World Commission on Human Security collected in the volume Human Insecurity in a Global World. The seminar is open to all graduate students and faculty at UW-Madison and will meet twice each month on roughly every 2nd and 4th Wednesday.

Globalization, Technological Change, and Regulatory Harmonization
Clark Miller , UW-Madison Professor of Economics and Public Affairs

The global expansion of economic markets has been accompanied by two important trends in world affairs. The first is a parallel expansion in global-scale technological systems that provide the infrastructural foundation for market activity: transportation, communication, energy, and manufacturing. The second is a proliferation of security, health, and environmental concerns that are closely coupled to the transformation of global technologies, as well as frequently to one another, and that raise important and complex questions for international governance. In this course, we will take a problem-centered approach to analyzing these issues, focusing on three prominent global issues: global pandemics, facilitated by the rapid growth of air transportation systems; nuclear weapons proliferation, fueled by the growing demand for nuclear energy systems; and the geopolitics of oil that characterizes fossil fuel-based production and transportation systems.

International Health and Global Society
Srirupa Prasad, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Medical History and Bioethics

SARS in East Asia and Canada; AIDS and malaria in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America; malnutrition and deficiency diseases in the developing world; stress, heart disease, and eating disorders in the United States and Europe: wherever we turn, we are assaulted by these images. The Internet, television, and print journalism ensure that we are never unaware of the health crises that besiege our globalizing society, to the extent that we see these problems as a symptom of globalization itself. Yet such concern is far from new. Historians and epidemiologists have long recognized that the "microbial unification of the world" dates at least to the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera devastated South Asia, Europe, and the United States; a century ago, bubonic plague and flu each killed millions globally. In this course, we will draw on a wide range of historical and anthropological materials and methods to examine the history of public health and medicine as international phenomena. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will explore topics such as the connections between global pandemics of infectious disease and European colonial expansion; strategies for curtailing the spread of disease across borders; historical and contemporary anxieties about the health consequences of global migration; and the emergence of a global medical marketplace. Particular themes include the connection between health and wealth; the relationship between culture and medical ideas and practices; and the tensions of practicing medicine in multicultural settings.

This is a basic introductory course to the subject of international law. The reason why the phrase "transnational legal process" is included in the title is to distinguish this course from one that focuses solely on "public international law." A public international law course addresses the law of nations and of international diplomacy, typically as practiced by public international lawyers in the Legal Advisor’s Office in the US Department of State. The only actors involved are states (i.e. it is inter-national law) and, to a certain extent, the United Nations and its International Court of Justice. This course involves the processes of "transnational law" as well, in the sense that it covers the cross-border (or trans-national) effects of national law and foreign law on a variety of actors. In short, this course broadens the scope of traditional coverage to help prepare students to developments in international and transnational law in an age of globalization in which non-state actors (including businesses and individuals) are also the makers and subjects of international law, and in which cross-border regulatory issues are of growing importance.

This course introduces students to the legal, business and policy aspects of international trade, focusing on United States trade law within the context of the WTO-GATT Agreements. There are no prerequisites for this course and no background in economics, international relations or international law is assumed.

The Politics of Social Movements
Leigh Payne, UW-Madison Professor of Political Science

This course introduces graduate students to the vast literature on social movements: different intellectual, disciplinary, and methodological orientations and their empirical application to the analysis of social movements around the world. Students will conduct their own original research project on a specific social movement.

Selected Problems in Administrative Law: Regulatory Reform
Louise Trubek, UW-Madison Professor of Law

This seminar explores new approaches to regulation and their implications for law, policy, and public administration. Critics of government regulation and the administrative state from the left and right have called for alternatives to conventional top-down, command and control regulatory systems. New approaches involving devolution, public-private partnerships, negotiated regulation, network creation, coordinated data collection, benchmarking, monitoring, feedback, and revisable standards are being tried out. This type of “new governance” changes the way law is created and administered. It restructures relationships among markets, government and the professions and re-opens the age-old issue of how best to maintain social and environmental values in a market economy.

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This course provides an introduction to international trade policy. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of international trade theory, rules, politics and institutions and the major policy issues facing the global trading system. The first part of the course presents a treatment of the theory of international trade. It explores the rationale for free trade, the distributional impact of trade, the impact of tariffs and quotas and the challenges presented by deeper international economic integration. The second part of the course deals with the World Trade Organization. It explores negotiation mechanisms and principles and the rules relating to market access, dispute settlement, fair trade, safeguards and trade-related intellectual property (TRIPs). The third part considers major issues facing the trading system. These include regional trading arrangements, foreign investment, China’s entry into the WTO and the Doha Development Agenda.

Fall 2005