The politics of the executive, legislative veto players and foreign debt

Choi, Seung-Whan; Luo, Shali Article The politics of the executive, legislative veto players and foreign debt International Trade, Politics and Development (ITPD) Provided in Cooperation with: Department of International Commerce, Finance, and Investment, Kyung Hee University Suggested Citation: Choi, Seung-Whan; Luo, Shali (2019) : The politics of the executive, legislative veto players and foreign debt, International Trade, Politics and Development (ITPD), ISSN 2632-122X, Emerald, Leeds, Vol. 3, Iss. 2, pp. 82-99, https://doi.org/10.1108/ITPD-05-2019-0003 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/319546 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The politics of the executive, legislative veto players and foreign debt Seung-Whan Choi University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA, and Shali Luo University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA Abstract Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine a curvilinear effect of legislative constraints on foreign debt. Design/methodology/approach –A cross-sectional, time-series data analysis of 68 developing countries during the period from 1981 to 1999 was performed. Findings –Foreign borrowing is most likely to increase at both low and high levels of legislative constraints, while it is most likely to decrease at moderate levels. Originality/value –The paper is a first-cut empirical analysis of a curvilinear relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt. Keywords The executive, Legislative veto players, Foreign debt, Curvilinear effect, Empirical analysis Paper type Research paper During the 1980s and early 1990s, many developing countries were plagued by astronomical foreign debt and the possibility of default. The debt crisis could have shattered the entire infrastructure of international financial and political systems (Gilpin, 1987, p. 317). As a result, academics and policy makers alike have had great interest in explaining and understanding why and how the debt crisis occurred. Although economists were the first to pay attention to the causes of the crisis by examining various negative macroeconomic developments, including a worldwide recession, reduced export sales and a sharp increase in interest rates, they tended to overlook political dimensions (e.g. Cline, 1995; Manzocchi, 1997). Several political economists have started to fill the gap by exploring the effect that such political factors as state autonomy, political instability and democratic governance had upon the crisis (e.g. Kaufman and Stallings, 1989). However, prior analyses have neglected the importance of institutional settings in analyzing how foreign debt is determined, especially variations in the policy-making power configuration between the executive and the legislature. To conceptualize how executive and legislative policy-making powers influence the ebb and flow of foreign borrowing, we borrow from Tsebelis’(1995, 1999, 2002) seminal work on veto players and then improve his theory by using some key concepts from other institutional approaches (see also Choi, 2010). Since Tsebelis explains that political constraints are characterized by the number of legislative veto players, their preferences and their cohesion, we use the term, legislative constraints, to develop our theoretical argument. When we strictly follow the main tenet of Tsebelis’veto player theory, we expect an inverse linear relationship between legislative constraints and foreign borrowing. International Trade, Politics and Development Vol. 3 No. 2, 2019 pp. 82-99 Emerald Publishing Limited 2586-3932 DOI 10.1108/ITPD-05-2019-0003 Received 18 January 2019 Revised 3 May 2019 Accepted 20 May 2019 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2586-3932.htm © Seung-Whan Choi and Shali Luo. Published in International Trade, Politics and Development. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creative commons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode 82 ITPD 3,2 However, after incorporating two additional assumptions about legislative behavior, we propose a U-shaped relationship between the two factors. We theorize that foreign debt is most likely to increase at both low and high levels of legislative constraints, while it is most likely to decrease at middle levels. Based on a cross-sectional, time-series data analysis of 68 developing countries during the period from 1981 to 1999, we uncover that the relationship between the distribution of legislative constraints and foreign debt is indeed curvilinear. In the next section, we present a brief discussion of literature review. By bridging the veto players theory with other institutional approaches, Section 2 offers a novel conceptual link between legislative constraints and foreign debt. Section 3 includes details of the research design, including both models’specification, operationalization and data sources. Following the research design, Section 4 encompasses the empirical findings and a discussion of the implications. Lastly, we conclude with a brief summary and policy implications. 1. Brief literature review The existing literature can be categorized into three groups. The first group of studies provides macroeconomic explanations. They link economic development, economic growth, exports, budget deficit, government consumption and IMF participation to the rise and fall of foreign debt (e.g. Wiesner, 1985; Kaufman and Stallings, 1989; Cline, 1995; Manzocchi, 1997; Potter, 2000; Vreeland, 2007). For example, quantitative studies such as Cline (1995) and Aggarwal (1996) explore the determinants of sovereign default in times of economic crisis. The second group pays attention to the type of regime (e.g. Olson, 1993; Oatley, 2010; Dasgupta and Ziblatt, 2016). It contends that democratic and autocratic countries have different political discount rates, which influence the borrowing and investment decisions of the government in a different way. For example, Easterly (2002) argues that because autocrats wish to stay longer in power, they are more likely to continue to borrow from the future in order to entertain/bribe their key supporters. By underscoring institutional constraints on the top executive as the democratic advantage, the third group further refines the second group (e. g. Cox and Saiegh, 2018). North and Weingast (1989) are the first to conceptualize that constitutional checks and balances play an important role in resolving commitment problems for the repayment of public debt. As government commitment and credibility increases, interest rates on public bonds should fall and reduce the need for debt financing. But several researchers later dispute the democratic advantage argument. For example, Biglaiser and Staats (2012) demonstrate that credit-rating agency bond raters do not care about the regime type itself but are rather interested in the stability of a certain government system, whether it is democratic or not. Along the same line, Yu’s (2016) cross-sectional, time-series analysis for the years 1970–2010 finds that political instability increases the likelihood of default. By proposing a novel theoretical argument about the curvilinear, rather than linear, relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt, our study improves the argument of the third group. The rationale is that the previous studies are still debating whether or not political factors such as regime type and institutional constraints are benign forces in addressing the accumulation of foreign debt and the debate is based on the assumption that political constraints/instability are linearly associated with foreign debt. Since the degree of political constraints and linear causality are important unresolved issues in the current literature, we look into them from new theoretical and empirical perspectives –exploring the curvilinear effect of legislative constraints. 2. The executive, legislative constraints and foreign debt Why and how foreign debt changes for individual countries may require multiple causal explanations if the uniqueness of each case were to be scrutinized. To illustrate, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania from 1965 until December 1989, decreased debt by refusing to allow new loans; in contrast, however, Argentina had an explosion of debt 83 Foreign debt when the central government was forced to take over the loans of the provinces. Although each of these cases should increase our knowledge about a particular debt problem, it pays little attention to finding a general pattern that reflects the nature of the ebb and flow of foreign debt across a large number of countries over several time periods. In this study we argue that, ceteris paribus, the political constraints which legislative veto players impose on the executive are an important predictor for foreign debt. From a unified theoretical perspective, Tsebelis’(1995, 1999, 2002) theory of veto players is the most sophisticated available in the literature of domestic political institutions. Tsebelis defines veto players as a certain number of individual or collective actors whose consensus is necessary for significant policy change, especially legislative change. This can be formulated both positively and negatively. On one hand, since the presence of multiple legislative veto players tends to thwart arbitrary policy changes by the executive, consistent and credible policy commitment is ensured. However, the flip side of this reasoning suggests that the inclusion of more legislative veto players leads to a political stalemate and thus causes policy reforms to be delayed or to even become impossible. In Tsebelis’(2002, p. 204) own words, “‘high level of commitment’is another way of saying ‘inability for political response.’” Existing applications of Tsebelis’(1995, 1999, 2002) veto players theory to economic performance provide evidence that there is an inverse linear relationship between the distribution of legislative constraints and policy outcomes: the difficulties of enacting significant policy changes grow as the number of legislative veto players increases, as their preferences or ideological distance grows, and as their internal coherence weakens. Accordingly, if the veto players theory is applied to explain a cause of foreign debt which is assumed to be a function of increased spending (for the sake of simplicity), it would predict an inverse linear relationship between legislative constraints and indebtedness. Countries with a low level of legislative constraints are subject to a heavy concentration of veto authority in the hands of the executive and thus are more prone to pushing for expansionary spending bills, resulting in more foreign borrowing. Countries with a high level of legislative constraints are geared toward dispersal of decision-making authority and thus face political stalemates between the executive and congressional legislators with respect to spending, a situation which requires less foreign borrowing. Simply put, the more legislative constraints that are placed on spending, the less foreign debt accrues. Thus, an inverse linear hypothesis concerning the relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt is drawn as follows: H1. Foreign debt decreases in proportion as legislative constraints increase. However, our hypothesis proposes that the relationship should be curvilinear: foreign debt varies non-linearly dependent on the level of legislative constrains. The possibility of such non-linearity requires correcting an implicit assumption of H1, namely, that the executive is the only actor who seeks to increase government expenditure, while the legislature acts as a political barrier to the executive’s spending desire. In contrast, we argue that both executive and congressional legislators have incentives to increase spending for their own political goals, and that variations in the policy-making power between the executive and the legislature non-linearly influence foreign debt. Specifically, we introduce two assumptions to explain the possibility of such non-linearity. First, it is assumed that because the executive and legislators face incentives to enhance their personal reputations for re-election, they seek to maximize spending power to benefit their particular constituents, which requires more borrowing from abroad. Second, it is assumed that the politics of foreign debt is explained in the context of three different configurations of domestic institutional settings which result from executive-legislative interactions: highly unconstrained political systems in which the executive is dominant in policy-making processes, highly constrained political systems in which congressional legislators are 84 ITPD 3,2 dominant, and moderately constrained political systems in which the balance of power between the executive and the legislature prevails, enabling each institution to possess a mutual veto. 2.1 Highly unconstrained political systems and foreign debt Highly unconstrained political systems are created when the executive him/herself possesses necessary and sufficient policy-making power to change the status quo or when the executive’s party controls Congress. In cases of single-party parliamentary governments, prime ministers are the most influential policy makers since there is no legislative veto by definition, assuming that there is no high degree of party factionalism. The UK, Japan, at times India and Canada are examples, to name a few. In cases of presidential systems under a unified government, the legislature is considered to possess no effectual veto power. Anticipating no legislative opposition in highly unconstrained institutional settings, the executive is capable of directly introducing his/her particularistic spending bills to Congress. These spending bills purport to be in line with the executive’s economic interests, thus elevating his/her personal reputations for re-election. In Kieweit and McCubbins’(1985, p. 182) words, “the president’s preferences […] derive in large part from the imperative of preserving an electoral coalition. This requires providing benefits to constituent groups”(see also Cox and McCubbins, 2001). Cheng and Haggard’s (2001, p. 224) study on Taiwan’s budget policy provides empirical evidence that “the president and the ruling party have had to cultivate ties with new constituencies (business, the middle class, and environmentalists), largely via private-regarding policy –that is, by providing more targeted and particularistic pork-barrel expenditures.”If the executive initiates costly projects that aim at buying the legitimacy from his/her target constituency such as big campaign donors (e.g. big construction business corporations), it leads to a high capacity of changing the status quo toward an expansionary spending direction because it permits the executive to squander financial resources for personal political ambitions, leading to an increase of foreign borrowing. This understanding of “unconstrained”political systems is very much in line with the veto players theory. Inadequate legislative checks and balances imply that the executive is capable of making unitary spending policy decisions, resulting in waste or mismanagement of the funds received. If the executive intends to favor a subset of the entire population for his/her re-election, he/she could simply ignore potential threats from ineffectual legislative veto players. In this sense, elected legislators become rubber stamps, rather than part of the real policy-making process regarding budget spending. It is not surprising to find desperate debt conditions, especially under authoritarian regimes such as in Indonesia, Malaysia and Zaire, in which the norm is a one-man rule coupled with ineffectual veto players like titular political parties (Haggard, 1986; MacIntyre, 2003). 2.2 Highly constrained political systems and foreign debt Highly constrained political systems are found in countries where policy-making power skews toward the hands of congressional legislators, especially in coalition governments. The ascendance of legislative power offers legislators opportunistic chances to maximize their re-election goals through expansionary spending bills. As Crepaz (2002, p. 174) puts it, “there is an inherent bias of coalition governments for expansionary policies through logrolling mechanisms. The logic of this expansive behavior among coalition partners is rather straightforward: individual coalition partners have distinctive constituencies and distinctive interests”(see also Crepaz and Moser, 2004). Such parochial interests combined with re-election goals motivate legislators to push for more spending for particular constituents; the resulting prediction is that more parties or actors involved in a legislative coalition will lead to greater government spending. This stands in marked contrast to the 85 Foreign debt veto players theory which predicts that larger coalitions–which are increases in veto players as each party in a coalition exercises a veto in its ability to bring down the government–result in policy stability, leading government spending to remain at the initial status quo. The reason for this difference is a more nuanced understanding of legislative behavior or, rather, the institutional determinants of legislative behavior in regards to spending. Elected legislators often have enormous incentives to make themselves personally known to prospective voters by providing particularistic or pork-barrel rewards such as infrastructure projects or legislation which allows local business companies greater access to foreign funds (Crisp et al., 2004). As such, each legislator has an incentive to increase spending for his/her own constituencies, even if their overall goal is to decrease government spending. These incentives create a collective action problem: each party attempts to decrease government spending without trying to give up its own spending desires, resulting in an expansion of government spending precisely because of each party’s reluctance to give up their own spending goals. Thus, an increase of foreign debt is the result of distributive logrolls by legislators who face personal vote seeking incentives and behave accordingly (Cox and McCubbins, 2001). This can be restated in regards to the observed political system being “highly constrained”: because the executive’svetopower is not strong enough to check and balance legislators’proclivity to parochial spending legislation in highly constrained institutional settings, the likely outcome is an upsurge of foreign debt, private or public. 2.3 Moderately constrained political systems and foreign debt Moderately constrained political systems refer to institutional settings in which the balance of policy-making power between the executive and the legislature is maintained. In such circumstances, both the executive and the legislature effectively exercise mutual veto powers to put checks and balances on the other side’s policy preferences. Because both institutions have the ability to apply brakes to a policy decision-making process, they are essentially capable of vetoing a spending policy change targeted at particularistic interests, diminishing the necessity of foreign borrowing. When the executive pursues expansionary spending policies for particular constituents, congressional legislators are capable of hindering the executive’s impulse to particularism. Conversely, when congressional legislators demand to increase spending expenditures for their particularistic constituents, the executive is able to simply exercise his/her veto power. To recap, when either the executive or the legislature is dominant in spending policy-making processes, each side will succumb to electoral incentives by offering particularistic benefits to their constituents, requiring an increase of foreign debt. However, when there is the executivelegislative balance of power, parochial spending bills will be blocked by mutual veto, keeping foreign debt low. Thus, a U-shaped hypothesis concerning the relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt is drawn as follows: H2. Foreign debt is likely to worsen in both highly unconstrained and highly constrained institutional settings, while foreign debt is likely to improve in moderately constrained institutional settings. 3. Statistical model building and operationalization To explore the hypothesized linear and curvilinear effects of legislative constraints on foreign debt empirically, two statistical models are considered: Foreign Debtit ¼aþb1Legislative Constraintsit ðÞ þb2to k Economic Variablesit ðÞ þe;(1) 86 ITPD 3,2 Foreign Debtit ¼aþb1Legislative Constraintsit ðÞþb2Legislative Constraints squaredit ðÞ þb3to kþ1Economic Variablesit ðÞþe:(2) Inferred from Tsebelis’veto players theory, the first equation is built to examine the influence of legislative constraints on indebtedness, while controlling for several economic factors. This equation tests the possibility of the inverse linear relationship expressed in H1. The second equation includes all variables in the first equation plus a squared term for legislative constraints to capture the possible quadratic relationship between legislative constraints and indebtedness expressed in H2 (on quadratic regression; see Agresti and Finlay, 1997, pp. 543-550; Gujarati, 2003, pp. 226-229). The first equation should produce biased estimates on the linear regression prediction line if the relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt is actually non-linear. The unit of analysis in these models is a country-year. A cross-sectional, time-series data set for 68 developing countries from 1981 to 1999 was collected from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2001, which includes no debt data on developed countries and whose data entry ends in 1999 (for the country list, see Table AI). The data analysis consists of two sets of tests. The first test employs cross-sectional, time-series regression models with fixed effects, which allows the intercept to differ among countries in recognition of the fact each country may have some specific characteristics of its own. In their “Dirty Pool”article, Green et al. (2001, p. 442) argue that “analyses of pooled cross-section data that make no allowance for fixed unobserved differences between [countries] often produce biased results.”The second test includes maximum-likelihood random-effects regression models, which assume that the intercept of each cross-sectional unit is a random drawing from a much larger population with a constant mean value[1]. These two types of statistical modeling will provide robust empirical testing. The dependent variable, foreign debt, is operationalized in terms of the change in the ratio of total foreign debt to GDP, which is the first difference of the level of debt. Because the level of indebtedness is unlikely to satisfy the stationarity conditions, the change in indebtedness, which is stationary and random, is instead employed (for the stationarity conditions, see Baltagi, 2001; Gujarati, 2003)[2]. Foreign debt is defined as “debt owed to nonresidents repayable in foreign currency, goods or services. It is the sum of public, publicly guaranteed, and private nonguaranteed long-term debt, use of IMF credit and short-term debt”(World Bank, 2001, p. 257). For the legislative constraints variable, we use Henisz’s (2000a, b) collection which measures the degree of political constraints produced by three institutional veto players: executive, lower and upper legislative chambers[3]. Simply put, the Henize measure assesses the level of political constraints imposed by legislative veto players on the executive. It is a continuous measure on a scale of 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest). It is worth noting that Tsebelis (2002, p. 204) acknowledges that “Henisz’s [measure] is conceptually very closely correlated with [my theory of] veto players, and covers an overwhelming number of countries.”With Tsebelis’recommendation, it appears that the Henisz measure is the best available measure in assessing the effect of legislative constraints on foreign debt. The legislative constraints squared variable is a squared term for the legislative constraints variable used for the quadratic function. As indicated in the U-shaped hypothesis, the coefficient for legislative constraints should have a negative sign, while that for legislative constraints squared should have a positive sign. Several economic factors are included as control variables to isolate the independent effect of legislative constraints on foreign debt. With this objective in mind, the following six control variables are considered: economic development, economic growth, exports, budget 87 Foreign debt deficit, government consumption and IMF participation. What follows is a brief discussion regarding each of these variables. One of the main concerns of political leaders in developing countries is the development of economic wealth for the well-being of the population. Because there is a shortage of sufficient development funds that can be used to build social and economic infrastructure, developing countries are likely to turn to foreign funds (Gilpin, 1987; Potter, 2000). However, as economic development progresses, developing countries should need less foreign financing for domestic projects. Economic development is measured as the log of GDP per capita. Economic growth should have a beneficial influence on domestic economies because it generates more usable government revenues to repay foreign debt. Thus, developing countries with expanding economies are likely to reduce indebtedness (Kaufman and Stallings, 1989). Economic growth is operationalized as the annual percentage growth rate of GDP at market prices based on a constant local currency. Reduced export sales should keep developing countries from achieving the large surpluses on the merchandise and services portion of the current account from which they need to pay interest on their foreign debts. By contrast, an export volume increase or surplus is expected to contribute to the decline of indebtedness (Roett, 1984; Manzocchi, 1997). Exports are measured as the sum of exports of goods and services divided by GDP. Most literature on international financial transactions highlights the detrimental effect of government deficits on macroeconomic performance. Budget deficits are often financed by foreign borrowing, so developing countries which operate in the red are likely to suffer from severe debt problems. However, the improvement of the budget deficit is anticipated to reduce foreign debt (Wiesner, 1985). Budget deficit is the proportion of deficits in GDP. The increase of government consumption should produce a demand for foreign capital (Cline, 1995). Government consumption is operationalized as the average general government consumption expressed as a percentage of GDP. Since IMF’s structural adjustment programs are designed to help reduce the borrowing country’s fiscal imbalances, their participant countries should be able to pay off the debt which they have accumulated (Vreeland, 2007). IMF participation is recorded as “1”and otherwise as “0.” The first five control variables are collected from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2001, and the IMF participation variable is obtained from Vreeland’s (2007) collection. Table AII provides a summary of the hypotheses and operationalization of the variables; Table AIII shows their descriptive statistics. Other potential controls such as world interest rates and interest rate differentials between high risk countries relative to the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) may affect foreign loans, but are not included because of the lack of data for all the countries and years of this study. There are no LIBOR data available before 1986, and this empirical analysis starts from 1981. In addition, the data are calculated daily, not yearly (see www.bba.org.uk/bba/jsp/ polopoly.jsp?d=141). More importantly, it would be very challenging to collect all the interest rates that were applied to the significant variety of loans lent to each country over the two decades of study (e.g. long-term vs short-term interest rates). Each foreign loan agreement is different and involves complicated financial arrangements. Table I summarizes a matrix of Pearson product–moment correlations between variables. This simple correlation analysis provides some preliminary results: there is an inverse linear relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt. As legislative constraints increase, indebtedness decreases, which is consistent with the prediction of the veto players theory. The other independent variables, except for government consumption, are negatively related to foreign debt. Before moving on to the multivariate regression results in the next section, a brief discussion of the multicollinearity problems that may be suspected among the 88 ITPD 3,2 Foreign debt Constraints Constraints 2 Econ develop Econ growth Exports Budget deficit Gov’t consum. IMF particip. Foreign debt 1.0000 Constraints −0.0821 1.0000 Constraints 2 −0.0685 0.9636 1.0000 Econ develop −0.0886 0.3582 0.3039 1.0000 Econ growth −0.2612 0.1267 0.1269 0.1708 1.0000 Exports −0.1257 0.0481 0.0257 0.3381 0.1335 1.0000 Budget deficit −0.2872 0.1301 0.1344 0.2525 0.2213 0.1472 1.0000 Gov’t consum. 0.1319 −0.1854 −0.1723 −0.0056 −0.0945 0.3167 −0.2990 1.0000 IMF particip. −0.0585 0.0470 0.0404 −0.0861 −0.1366 −0.0739 −0.0305 −0.1372 1.0000 Table I. A matrix of Pearson product–moment correlations 89 Foreign debt 7. It is interesting to note that the validity of Polity remains open to question. For example, Munck and Verkuilen (2002, p. 26) observe that: “not only is virtually no theoretical justification for this operation provided, but it is also open to criticism due to the [Polity] index’sproblemsof conceptual logic.” 8. It is also not advisable to test legislative constraints and Polity in the same model because they are conceptually and empirically related to each other. 9. 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(2002), Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, New York, NY and Princeton, NJ. 97 Foreign debt Vreeland, J.R. (2007), The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending, Routledge, London and New York, NY. Wiesner, E. (1985), “Latin American debt: lessons and pending issues”,American Economic Review, Vol. 75 No. 2, pp. 191-195. World Bank (2001), World Development Indicator 2001, World Bank, Washington, DC. Yu, S. (2016), “The effect of political factors on sovereign default”,Review of Political Economy, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 397-416. Appendix Algeria Chile Fiji Iran Morocco Philippines Togo Argentina China Gabon Ivory Coast Nepal South Korea Trindidad & Tobago Bolivia Colombia Gambia Jamaica Nicaragua Rwanda Tunisia Botswana Comoros Ghana Kenya Nigeria Senegal Uruguay Brazil Congo, Rep. Guatemala Lesotho Oman South Africa Venezuela Burkina Faso Costa Rica Guinea Madagascar Pakistan Sri Lanka Zaire Burundi Dominican Republic GuineaBissau Malawi Panama Sudan Zambia Cameroun Ecuador Guyana Mali Papua New Guinea Swaziland Zimbabwe Central African Rep Egypt India Mauritius Paraguay Syria Chad El Salvador Indonesia Mexico Peru Thailand Table AI. List of sample countries Variable Hypothesis Operationalization (and data sources) Legislative constraints The non-linear relationship between legislative constraints and foreign debt displays a U-shaped curve A continuous scale of lowest 0 to highest 1 (data from Henisz’s (2000a, b) collection) Legislative constraints squared A squared term for legislative constraints (data from Henisz’s (2000a, b) collection) Economic development The higher the economic development, the lower the foreign debt The log of GDP per capita (data from World Bank’s (2001) collection) Economic growth The higher the economic growth, the lower the foreign debt Economic growth rate (data from World Bank’s (2001) collection) Exports The higher the export volume, the lower the foreign debt The sum of exports of goods and services divided by GDP (data from World Bank’s (2001) collection) Budget deficit The improvement of budget deficit is likely to reduce foreign debt The proportion of deficits in GDP (data from World Bank’s (2001) collection) Government consumption The higher the government consumption, the higher the foreign debt The average general final government consumption as a percentage of GDP (data from World Bank’s (2001) collection) IMF participation The IMF participation is likely to reduce foreign debt 1 for the IMF participation (data from Vreeland’s (2007) collection) Table AII. Hypotheses and operationalization 98 ITPD 3,2 Corresponding author Seung-Whan Choi can be contacted at: [email protected] Variable Observations Mean SD Minimum Maximum Foreign debt 892 0.0027 0.0531 −0.5374 0.4850 Legislative constraints 892 0.2036 0.2141 0.0000 0.6547 Legislative constraints squared 892 0.0872 0.1095 0.0000 0.4287 Economic development 892 6.9869 1.0325 4.7265 9.3872 Economic growth 892 1.1694 4.9349 −16.3590 34.5970 Exports 892 28.2342 15.1123 3.3383 80.3273 Budget deficit 892 −3.7863 6.1287 −61.1410 20.6260 Government consumption 892 14.0642 5.8826 2.9755 45.9590 IMF participation 892 0.5157 0.5000 0.0000 1.0000 Table AIII. Descriptive statistics Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Constant −0.0118 (0.0152) −0.0123 (0.0151) 0.8661 (0.7887) 0.8802 (0.7828) Legislative constraints −0.0049 (0.0097) −0.0672** (0.0344) −0.0008 (0.0103) −0.0636** (0.0346) Legislative constraints 2 0.1219** (0.0651) 0.1231** (0.0654) Economic development 0.0029* (0.0022) 0.0034* (0.0022) 0.0026 (0.0022) 0.0032* (0.0022) Economic growth −0.0024*** (0.0004) −0.0024*** (0.0004) −0.0024*** (0.0004) −0.0024*** (0.0004) Exports −0.0005*** (0.0001) −0.0005*** (0.0001) −0.0005*** (0.0001) −0.0005*** (0.0001) Budget deficit −0.0022*** (0.0004) −0.0024*** (0.0004) −0.0022*** (0.0004) −0.0023*** (0.0004) Government consumption 0.0006* (0.0004) 0.0004 (0.0004) 0.0005 (0.0004) 0.0003 (0.0004) IMF participation −0.0073** (0.0037) −0.0073** (0.0037) −0.0072** (0.0037) −0.0072** (0.0037) Time changes −0.0004 (0.0004) −0.0004 (0.0004) Notes: Standard errors in parentheses. *po0.10; **po0.05; ***po0.01 Table AIV. The effect of legislative constraints on foreign debt: FGLS For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm Or contact us for further details: [email protected] 99 Foreign debt