At the present time, the political popularity of foreign assistance, both bilateral and multilateral, has reached a low point in the United States. The lack of enthusiasm is epitomized by the vote of the House of Representatives in January 1974 against the United States's pledge of $550 million to support the International Development Association (IDA), the soft-loan subsidiary of the World Bank (even though that vote was subsequently reversed). Total US commitments of official development assistance have declined from 0.59 percent of GNP in 1963 to 0.29 percent in 1972.

Available data on the activities of the multinationals and other aspects of international economic relations have rendered traditional approaches to the study of international politics, international organizations and the international system obsolete. The political and economic facts of international life are so intertwined that it has become compulsory to resort to the findings of political economy to discuss the international system and its functions and to assess properly the role and functions of the United Nations within it.

This study deals with the opening phase of the UN negotiations concerning the future international regime for ocean space. It seeks to establish how the technological and economic capabilities of member nations condition the manner and style of negotiation, the definition of national objectives, and the growth of attitudes and expectations with regard to such a regime. By the end of the 1968–70 period expectations about the future international regime had narrowed noticeably. Yet, for long-range tactical reasons many delegations were still holding out in anticipation of a new Law of the Sea Conference. The original Maltese seabed proposal envisaged a comprehensive international regime. In general, developing countries favored such a solution in the beginning, while industrialized countries preferred an intermediate solution. Eventually the Maltese proposal and the negotiating situation inadvertently set off a wave of claims for various forms of national jurisdiction. This meant that the emphasis at the end was more on the rights of the coastal states and less on the capacity of the world community to deal collectively with the future of ocean space.

Writing about alternative international regimes to deal with direct foreign investment (DFI) may seem to be somewhat like discussing a perpetual motion machine: most people would like one for their own purposes; no one has ever built one; and discussions about their construction often take on a certain air of unreality. In contrast to the issue areas of money, trade, and aid, there is no important set of international institutions concentrating primarily on DFI. Numerous bilateral agreements and multilateral arrangements regulate or facilitate, in one way or another, the activities of private investors, but these have not been systematized into a coherent structure. Negotiations for new agreements do not take place within a large and semiformal international arrangement, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and no large international institution, such as the World Bank in the aid field, exists primarily to give direction to activities in this area.

The existence of quasi-sovereign international institutions raises important questions regarding the level of national influence and the degree of democratic control over international political decisions which can be exercised within a multilateral political framework. Karl Kaiser suggests that “as the number and activities of international organizations expand, an area grows in which major decisions are made without much democratic control by the peoples and institutions which are affected or which support these activities financially. Because the national government is still the basic unit of political organization in contemporary world politics, it is necessary that national governments oversee the operations of the international institutions if the principle of public control over those who make the major political decisions is to be retained. For oversight to be effective, and for the principle of public control over the makers of political decisions to be retained, oversight must be reinforced by sufficient access to information so that governments can regulate these institutions and so that citizens can control governments.

Evidence on the extent of individual demand for international security programs is presented and analyzed. Factors affecting the extent of demand and the circumstances under which individuals might be willing to pay for peacekeeping are discussed. Eliminating the outright prohibition of contributions by individuals would be an effective way to stimulate disclosure of monetary evaluations of international security programs and to learn more about the extent of demand for them.

With the great spread and intensification of marine fisheries exploitation, the traditional fisheries regime of free and open access (part of traditional “freedom of the seas”) has been modified by many regional or stock-related management arrangements, and is now undergoing drastic change through a radical extension of coastal state jurisdictions. This article deals mostly with the development of various regional and stock-related arrangements. After sketching the overall purposes of management, the aiticle details some of the differences among competing states which have delayed or limited management arrangements, or otherwise complicated their development. Issues of allocation may be uppermost for competing interests, discussed here in the context of shifts from undivided to divided catch limits. The regulatory powers of intergovernmental fisheries commissions have generally been quite limited. While fisheries scientists have in some cases performed vital roles in encouraging regional arrangements, their information and advice has been of limited scope and influence in securing more restrictive regulatory regimes. FAO's Committee on Fisheries (COFI) might be called a global fisheries commission, though much of its most important work has related to amimating and supporting arrangements of a regional character. The radical shift outward of national jurisdictions is rearranging fisheries exploitation in most parts of the world. Given the nature of the resource, however, some forms of regional or stock arrangements will still be needed if the overall purposes of management are to be realized.

Information from four audits, or audit-like reviews, of international relief programs in the Nigerian-Biafran war sheds considerable light on the financial sources, scope, timing of flows, and cost-efficiency associated with that complex operation. Beyond their intrinsic interest, which is heightened by two of the documents remaining unpublished, such economic data bear heavily on many political aspects of the relief effort. For example, they permit examination of the relationship, and partial disjunction, between dominance in contributions (which was mainly governmental and particularly American) and leadership in administration (which was chiefly continental European and private). They also facilitate an assessment of the massive or token proportions of these endeavors, their capacity to anticipate rather than just respond tardily to predictable catastrophes, and the extent of their entanglement in the domestic and international power fields that characterized the Nigerian conflict. For all their rather divergent modi operandi, the leading role in the relief process of the two private umbrella organizations is clearly apparent; but so too is the limited ambit of even such comparatively massive relief work within the context of an on-going civil war.

The paper examines the role of the world's fishery technocrats and experts in international fisheries management. The system of management provided by the regionally based international fisheries commissions is organized on transgovern-mental and transnational lines. Political delegates to the commissions are usually government technocrats, suggesting that the system is basically transgovernmental. However, the role of scientific advisers to the commissions is studied, since the group may preempt political control through its control on expertise. Results of a questionnaire sent to 900 scientists throughout the world are given, using the data from a structured sample of 84 scientists. Most were found to be trained as natural scientists, and most were employed directly by national governments or through government reseaich institutes. “Elite” scientists in the group, and some executive heads of commissions were also analyzed, and found to have a generally cautious approach to problems of fishery ownership and management. In sum, the transgovernmental system itself was found to allow yet set the limits of transnational role playing by fishery experts.

This essay presents a framework for viewing North-South economic relations which, it is hoped, will facilitate positive analysis and will contribute toward normative prescriptions regarding the desirable trend of North-South economic relations in the future. The primary point of departure is the viewpoint of the South as it faces the whole range of its relationships with the North.

This article considers how an established international organization with responsibility for programs of pure and applied science adapts its organizational format and purposes to newly defined tasks. It examines the institutional response of IOC (the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) to the specification of new obligations in the environmental field as stipulated by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and as developed by the Environmental Program that the Conference established. Its main theme is the place of specialized knowledge, and the role of experts at the various stages of policy formation, within national governments and international forums. In analyzing the adaptation of IOC through expert and non-expert activities, our aim is to determine whether new programs and initiatives are fiUed to the existing framework, or produce new structures and institutional arrangements.

Traditionally, examinations of the international relations of the less developed countries (LDCs) have focused on influences that can be attributed generally as originating in the developed countries (DCs). In fact, relatively few scholarly analyses of inter-LDC relations have been undertaken. Since South-South relations have grown appreciably in recent years, however, it is important that a framework for studying these relations be developed, and this framework must include an awareness of the significance of the international economic system

In the past few decades we have been improving our understanding of the weather system and exploring ways to modify it. Over sixty countries have experimented with modifying the weather. The new technology of weather and climate modification will raise important political problems which will demand new responses from the international community. Whether states will be able to establish the cooperative measures necessary to develop and manage new technology depends upon whether there are sufficient incentives to do so. This article analyzes the historical patterns of international cooperation in meteorology, and then plots against several time horizons projected developments and capabilities in weather modification technology and the potential problems emerging from using the technology. It derives a tentative picture of the responsibilities demanded, compares the likely responses with those needed, and assesses whether they will be adequate for the problems projected.

Conceived modestly, the idea of East-West interdependence offers a convenient framework for exploring the intersection of politics with economics, of national economic goals with international economic relations, and, ultimately, of East-West efforts to increase economic cooperation with Western efforts to restructure international economic institutions. By interdependence we do not mean to imply a decisive set of arrangements, capable of impinging on the most fundamental economic and political choices of the other party. Rather, we have in mind a lesser level of mutual dependence in which both or all parties view cooperation as a useful but not a decisive means for pursuing some or all of their essential economic goals. More simply, we use the term because, better than any other, it underscores the difference between an economic relationship imposed by political confrontation, and reflected in economic warfare and autarky, and an economic relationship benefiting from the easing of political tension, evident in a common recognition of gains, political as well as economic, to be had from cooperation.