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Good(s) for everyone? Policy area competition and institutional topologies in the regime complexes of tax avoidance and intellectual property

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Abstract

While many issue areas of global governance have witnessed the proliferation of evermore overlapping institutions, the topologies underlying regime complexes differ from strongly centralised, to rather decentralised institutional structures. This paper contributes to a better understanding of this phenomenon in two ways. First, it proposes a conceptualisation of institutional topologies that takes a social network perspective. Second, building on economic good theories, the paper complements the existing arguments about policy area competition claiming that they overlooked the important role of the (non-)excludability of institutional benefits. This policy specific variable shapes an institutional complex’s propensity for competition which, in turn, spurs the (de)centralisation of institutional complexes. Two structured comparisons provide empirical support for this argument: comparing the propensities for competition and network structures underlying the institutional complexes of TA and intellectual property protection, I show that despite their many similarities, fundamental differences regarding the excludability of institutional benefits co-vary with fundamentally different institutional configurations. I complement these findings with qualitative case studies of institutionalisation processes in both policy fields rendering further empirical support for the theory’s underlying causal claim.

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Notes

  1. Crossing both dimensions, the economic literature differentiates between purely private goods, club goods, common pool resources and public goods. For more nuanced and detailed differentiations of different types of good see e.g. Kaul et al. (2003); Barrett (2007); Sandler (2004: 82); Cornes and Sandler (1996).

  2. In particular powerful states have profound interests in institutions that provide public goods. Such institutions can stabilise the institutional order thereby fortifying their central position and reassuring themselves against potential revisionist behaviour by emerging powers (Gowa 1989; Nye 2002; Gilpin 2016: 364 f.).

  3. I gathered state membership status from each organisation’s official institutional website and available up-to-date documents containing membership status information.

  4. For the policy field of TA, I consulted the OCED dataset on Statutory Corporate Income Tax Rates to identify 17 states with the relatively lowest CIT rates and 19 states with the highest CIT rates for the year 2018 (OECD 2019a). For the policy field of IPRs, I consulted the WIPO dataset on total patent applications (direct and PCT national phase entries) identifying 33 states with the highest total number of patent applications as reported for the year 2017 (WIPO 2019).

  5. For the issue area of TA, I consulted Rixen (2008, 2011), Brauner (2002) and Christians (2010) to identify the most important multilateral tax institutions. For the issue area of IPRs, I consulted Helfer (2004), (2009), Raustiala and Victor (2004) and Sell (2017) to identify the most relevant multilateral IPR institutions.

  6. To ensure comparability of frequencies across institutions and policy fields, I performed weighting procedures. For each 5 years, the number of references within a specific set of institutional documents was weighted by the total number of documents.

  7. Dark shades indicate high betweenness centralities, light shades indicate low betweenness centralities. The measure of betweenness centrality captures the number of shortest paths passing through a respective node indicating how all other network institutions connect via this institution (Freeman 1977: 35).

  8. Tables including all centralisation scores for both reference networks are available in this paper’s Appendix.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors of JIRD, the three anonymous reviewers, the participants of the final conference ‘Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order’ 2021 at the WZB, the participants of the IR colloquium at LMU Munich, and the participants of the DVPW IR Young Professionals Conference in March 2020. I am particularly grateful to Bernhard Zangl, Laura Seelkopf, Eyal Benvenisti, Andreas Kruck, Felix Biermann, Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Moritz Weiß, Berthold Rittberger and Sebastian Schindler for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. Last but not least I want to thank Nadia El Ghali for her excellent research assistance.

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    Benjamin Daßler

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Appendices

Appendix

Centralities by institution for both policy fields

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Coefficient of variation of weighted references and betweenness centralisation

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Daßler, B. Good(s) for everyone? Policy area competition and institutional topologies in the regime complexes of tax avoidance and intellectual property. J Int Relat Dev 25, 993–1019 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00267-x

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