This final chapter summarises the central contributions and the main lessons of the whole Institutional Diagnostic Project as synthetised in the present volume. It also addresses the question of their possible implications for development assistance.

This chapter draws on Joseph Nye’s original definition of soft power as being the ability of a country or region to influence others by virtue simply of their wish to emulate them. As in the attractiveness of US culture during the cold war, and by the eagerness of post-communist Central and Eastern European countries to adopt the EU model as the basis of their economic and social reforms. The chapter notes however that while soft power is not a policy instrument as such, it can be linked to instruments such as aid or trade preferences to influence the behaviour of partners. The approach is therefore to look at the relationship between the values embodied in aid priorities of the EU institutions and the major donor states. Using a “Finger Kreinin Index” we find that the EU and its Member States are to some extent pulling in the same direction, but that the degree of coherence with the EU institutions varies across the key Member States. The tentative conclusion is that the EU and its Member States have been complementing rather than either replicating or contradicting each other’s actions.

The preceding chapters captured the activities of the WTO that generate headlines – the biennial meetings of trade ministers. Those events are graded by whether the ministers are able to reach agreement or fail to do so. There is much more to the WTO – much that is important but not well-known other than to officials from member countries. The chapter is designed to show what the WTO does on a regular basis, by putting the reader into WTO meetings, vicariously.

How did democracy promotion become a key goal of Sweden’s official development assistance (ODA)? Existing research has regarded comparatively high levels of ODA as a key indicator of Sweden’s foreign policy exceptionalism, supposedly rooted in domestic values of solidarity, democracy, and equality. However, such culturalist accounts of foreign policy exceptionalisms tend to mystify rather than clarify the influence of values. In this chapter, I seek to provide a different account of how values shape foreign policy, using the goal of democracy promotion through ODA as an illustrative case. While policy documents occasionally refer to unique Swedish experiences of democracy, I argue that the beliefs governing Swedish democracy promotion efforts rather result from contentious political processes and have been partly shaped by evolving international conjectures. Empirically, the paper analyzes how Swedish policymakers have framed the aims and strategies of democracy promotion in ODA from the 1960s to the 2010s.

In chapter two, we examine North Korea’s post-war recovery and its extraordinarily rapid transition towards a modern industrial economy in the 1950s. Here we draw attention to the massive financial support that North Korea received from elsewhere in the socialist bloc in that decade. The existence of the more advanced ally of the Soviet Union and its generous developmental assistance underpinned Kim Il Sung’s ultimately erroneous belief that North Korea would not have to sacrifice living standards in order to pursue a strategy of heavy industrialisation. Developmental strategies were, however, mediated through ongoing domestic political struggles. The factional disputes of the 1950s were in part related to questions of developmental strategy and were a reflection of the exiled nature of Korea’s communist movement during the colonial era and the nature of the various factions’ international linkages. In this chapter, we also draw attention to the substantive nature of North Korea’s developmental policies in the 1950s, including that of the socialisation of production. We also examine the decline of international aid to North Korea towards the latter part of the decade, and how that led to increased emphasis on mass mobilisation campaigns. This chapter consists of original, unpublished material.

This chapter employs original data on land reform and property rights to empirically test the theory. Using data from Latin America from 1920–2010 and cross-tabulation, regression, and instrumental variables analysis, the chapter find strong evidence in support of the theory that property rights gaps are generated by authoritarian regimes where the ruling coalition of political elites does not overlap with landed elites. In contrast, property rights gaps are typically closed by democracies, especially when peasants are in the ruling coalition and legislative fractionalization does not give opposition lawmakers a chance to block reform. Property rights gaps are also closed by both authoritarian regimes and democracies when countries are forced into structural adjustment programs. And left-wing ideology and state capacity play a role well in property rights gaps. This chapter also finds that the governments that redistribute property without rights also distort crop prices to render beneficiaries dependent on the government, and through a comparative analysis of nationalizations of banks and natural resources shows that the withholding of property rights over land is strategic.