TY - JOUR AU - Bagwell,Kyle AU - Staiger,Robert W. TI - National Sovereignty in an Interdependent World JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 10249 PY - 2004 Y2 - January 2004 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10249 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10249.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Kyle Bagwell Department of Economics Stanford University Landau Economics Building 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: (650) 723-3251 E-Mail: kbagwell@stanford.edu Robert W. Staiger Department of Economics Stanford University Landau Economics Building 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: 650/723-0533 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: rstaiger@stanford.edu AB - What are the sovereign rights of nations in an interdependent world, and to what extent do these rights stand in the way of achieving important international objectives? These two questions rest at the heart of contemporary debate over the role and design of international institutions as well as growing tension between globalization and the preservation of national sovereignty. In this paper, we propose answers to these two questions. We do so by first developing formal definitions of national sovereignty that capture features of sovereignty emphasized in the political science literature. We then utilize these definitions to describe the degree and nature of national sovereignty possessed by governments in a benchmark (Nash) world in which there exist no international agreements of any kind. And with national sovereignty characterized in this benchmark world, we then evaluate the extent to which national sovereignty is compromised by international agreements with specific design features. In this way, we delineate the degree of tension between national sovereignty and international objectives and describe how that tension can be minimized and in principle at times even eliminated through careful institutional design. ER -