Ratification counts: US investment treaties and FDI flows into developing countries

The non-ratification of bilateral investment treaties in Brazil: a story of conflict in a land of cooperation†

“…Interestingly, however, even though without entering into force BITs cannot fulfill their intended role as legally binding instruments for the promotion and protection of foreign investment, and despite recent evidence that FDI flows seem to increase only as BITs are ratified (Egger and Merlo, 2012;Haftel, 2010), with few exceptions most work has either focused on treaty signature or treated signature and ratification interchangeably. 3 Moreover, despite the wide variation in the 'spell' 4 and rate 1959 1963 1967 1971 1975 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2003 2007 of success of BIT ratification, our understanding of the factors that drive this process remains incipient.…”

Policy space and regional predilections: Partisanship and trade agreements in Latin America

“…I also ran the fixed effects models while including dummy variables for year fixed effects, and the results are consistent with those reported here. Finally, I specified the models using the date of PTA ratification (as opposed to date of signature) for coding the dependent variable (see generally, Haftel 2010). In these models, I again found a negative relationship between left-wing government and PTA ratification.…”

Can I stay a BIT longer? The effect of bilateral investment treaties on political survival

“…Several studies find that the number of veto players influences the timing of ratification (Haftel 2010;Baccini and Urpelainen 2013;Haftel and Thompson 2013). As such, I include Henisz (2002a)'s measure of veto players to account for this effect.…”

“…But as is the case with any signaling game, the signal (BIT) must have some sort of cost associated with it so that it can help distinguish the types of governments that are truly favorable to foreign investment from those that are merely signing these treaties to seem as if they are favorable to MNC activity (Fearon 1997). Haftel (2010) adds an important layer to the signaling mechanism. To enjoy increased FDI inflows, governments must ratify these agreements, which entails non-negligible costs.…”