Global Political Economy
The policy paper should be about Cuba opening up to foreign direct investment liked talked about in this article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-26807489
The paper should be angled into how cuba can make it better. you can angle it in the way you want to .
This is the guidelines the professor has sent out. take a look at the examples to get a sense of how it needs to be
Here
are the promised specifications regarding the final policy paper, of the kind
usually published by think tanks or other political consultancies as they try
to give advice on policy-making to political decision-makers. For this policy paper (or, more
precisely, “policy brief”, as the short versions are usually called) I want you
to take a current news article, which introduces a political problem that is
relevant for Global Political Economy, as your point of departure. It should be
an article from 2014, in English, and from a respectable media outlet (NYT, Guardian, Economist, etc.).
You
should then use analytical frameworks, concepts and/or theories that we’ve
covered throughout the semester in our course to analyze the problem (or challenge, as policy wonks prefer
to call problems) identified in this news article (section 1). The objective,
however, is not to lead a theoretical/academic debate, but to provide insights
on what the political causes of the problem are, and why there has been no
solution so far. You can, of course, bring in your own ideas and outside
material.
This
analytical part should lead to a section that develops and discusses policy
options – two or three political responses/decisions that would address the
problem identified before (section 2). This should involve a discussion of the “trade
offs” each policy option involves – different choices have different (dis-)advantages,
costs and benefits, and create different winners and losers. It also concerns time
horizons: one option may be cheap + easy in the short run, but less effective
in the long run, another option costly + difficult in the beginning, but more
effective in the long run.
Finally,
you should evaluate the different policy options and come up with a policy
recommendation – an argument about which policy should be adopted by the person/organization
you’re writing your policy paper for (section 3). You can choose freely who you
want to “work” for as a policy consultant – a political leader, the head of an
NGO or an international organization, the CEO of a company – just watch out
that, in section 1, you make it clear why/how the issue you focus on is
relevant for your specific client. In this part, I will mainly evaluate your
analysis of the political feasibility of
your recommendation – what are its chances of becoming implemented? Is there
enough support for it, and/or how can sufficient support be mobilized?
At
the very end, you should condense your whole paper into an executive summary
that will precede your policy paper.
All
of this should comprise 6-8 pages:
Executive
Summary (0,5-1 page)
Introduction
(1 page)
Problem
Analysis (2-3 pages)
Policy
Options (2-3 pages)
Policy
Recommendation (1 page)
Here are three examples of
policy papers you can look at, simply in order to get a feel of the structure
and the style of such publications (they don’t always follow the rules I’ve
given you above – notably, they don’t always discuss political feasibility):
The ECFR looks at the EU’s
sanctions policy:
http://ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR71_SANCTIONS_BRIEF_AW.pdf
The IIE advocates for a
multilateral investment agreement:
http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb13-1.pdf
The IIE analyzes currency
manipulations:
http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb12-19.pdf