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Key aspects of international policy, such as those pertaining to migration and trade, manifest in the physical world at international political borders; for this reason, borders are of interest to political science studying the impacts and implications of these policies. While some prior efforts have worked to characterize features of borders us- ing trained human coders and crowdsourcing, these are limited in scale by the need for manual annotations. In this paper, we present a new task, dataset, and baseline approaches for estimating the legibility of international political borders automatically and on a global scale. Our contributions are to (1) define the border legibility estimation task; (2) collect a dataset of overhead (aerial) imagery for the entire world’s international borders, (3) propose several classical and deep-learning-based approaches to establish a baseline for the task, and (4) evaluate our algorithms against a validation dataset of crowdsourced legibility com- parisons. Our results on this challenging task confirm that while low-level features can often explain border legibility, mid- and high-level features are also important. Finally, we show preliminary results of a global analysis of legibility, confirming some of the political and geographic influences of legibility.
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The Political Economy of Deep Integration
Modern trade agreements no longer emphasize basic trade liberalization but instead focus on international policy coordination in a much broader sense. In this review we introduce the emerging literature on the political economy of such deep integration agreements. We organize our discussion around three main points. First, the political conflict surrounding trade agreements is moving beyond the classic antagonism of exporter interests who gain from trade and import-competing interests who lose from trade. Second, there is a more intense popular backlash against deep integration agreements than there was against shallow integration agreements. Finally, the welfare economics of trade agreements has become more complex, in the sense that the goal of achieving freer trade is no longer sufficient as a guide to evaluating the efficiency of international agreements.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1949374
- PAR ID:
- 10415577
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Review of Economics
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1941-1383
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 19 to 38
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-121020-032425
