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Studies of NATO rely heavily on military spending as a fraction of GDP as the key indicator of members’ contribution to the alliance, but a growing number of scholars have challenged this approach. We suggest that each member’s public goods provision is a better measure of commitment to the alliance. In the case of post-Cold War NATO, out-of-area troop deployments (adjusted for population) constitute one of the strongest indicators of a state’s contribution to public goods. Providing troops for NATO missions in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina is one of the clearest signals of high commitment to the alliance. Using deployment data from 2004 to 2018, we show that there is evidence of disproportionate burden-sharing within the alliance. Countries like Slovenia, Denmark, the USA and UK contributed far more to NATO deployments than others like Turkey, Spain, Poland, and Portugal. We also use the data to begin examining possible causes of these disparities. We find that wealthier countries, countries that spend more on their militaries, and newer alliance members are more likely to contribute. Our indicator and first-cut model open avenues for further research on why some members demonstrate higher commitment to NATO than others.

In this article we broaden the conventional understanding of prestige and show that prestige-seeking played a major role in the Danish and Norwegian decisions to provide military support to post-Cold War US-led wars. Both countries made costly military contributions in the hope of increasing their standing and prestige in Washington. Both governments regarded prestige as a form of soft power, which they could later convert into access, influence, and US support. Our findings are far from trivial. They make a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that small powers understand and seek prestige in ways that differ fundamentally from the ways great powers do. They also help to explain why smaller US allies made costly contributions to the Balkan, Afghan, Iraq, and Libyan wars at a time when there was no direct threat to their national security and their security dependence on the United States was low. The high value that small US allies attach to their visibility and prestige in Washington suggests that it is far easier for the United States to obtain military support from smaller allies than Realist studies of burden-sharing and collective action problems would lead us to expect.

This article argues that NATO's current burden-sharing regime, which I term the proportional model of NATO burden-sharing and which obligates each NATO member to allocate at least 2 percent of its GDP to defence, is deeply flawed from a purely ethical standpoint. This is because the proportional model omits from its approach to distributing the burdens of collective defence two morally relevant ally-level characteristics: namely, individual level of economic development and individual level of external threat. The model therefore treats unfairly both those allies characterized by especially low levels of economic development and those allies characterized by especially high levels of external threat, relative in each case to the alliance-wide average. The article argues that the proportional model should be replaced by that I term the prioritarian model of NATO burden-sharing, which is grounded in the normative theory of prioritarianism from the distributive justice literature. The prioritarian model would morally improve upon the proportional model by incorporating the aforementioned two ally-level characteristics (level of economic development and level of external threat) into its burden-sharing system in the form of two action-guiding prescriptions. The prioritarian model is therefore the fairer of the two models and consequently should be adopted by NATO.

We have collected data from a world-wide survey among COP delegates to empirically investigate preferences for certain burden sharing rules among key groups in a setting that reflects the possibility of observing concessions from negotiating partners. In our survey, the participants had the opportunity to select and combine up to eight (pre-defined) burden sharing rules and to assign relative weights to the selected rules in their preferred bundle. We examine whether such a mechanism helps to overcome the currently strictly (self-interested) strategic claims on equity in the negotiation process. We observe that delegates from different groups of countries show a general willingness for concessions. However, the degree to which different burden sharing rules are taken into consideration partly differs between countries. As a key insight we report that the individual assessment of the polluter-pays rule based on current emissions does not only stress the persistence of the traditional Annex-B/Non-Annex-B division but also suggests tendencies for a more fragmented grouping with different positions between, for example, delegates from developing countries (i.e. G77 members) and emerging countries (i.e. BASIC). At the same time, we observe tendencies for a more harmonized view among key groups towards the ability-to-pay rule in a setting of weighted burden sharing rules.

Over the past few years, the EU has been challenged by multiple disintegration forces sustained by a growing number of Eurosceptic citizens. In this critical scenario, Italy has emerged as a relevant case because of its transformation from a leading pro-integration country to a country where EU integration is an increasingly divisive issue. We explore the relationship between Italian public opinion and the EU, with a specific interest in understanding how the coronavirus crisis may affect such a relationship, supposing that our case study may also be revealing as to how a crisis context can produce effects on the popular legitimacy of the EU. We show that in Italy there is demand from some majoritarian segments of society for stronger cooperation in the EU. To explain the apparent paradox of why Italians decreasingly feel that their country benefits from the EU but still want to increase EU cooperation in certain areas, we turn to the argument of the public's instrumental approach to the principle of burden-sharing: citizens support deeper integration to face the costs of the most pressing crises affecting the country and the EU at large.

The authors call on G20 leaders to extend more predictable and substantial support to low-and-middle-income countries that host refugees, in recognition of the global public good that these countries provide. Together with other high-income countries, G20 countries should fully cover the cost of providing for the basic and social needs of refugees. They should also help to expand public services and infrastructure for refugees as well as resident populations. Such international support for the economic integration and social inclusion of refugees will be most effective if host countries grant refugees a firm legal status with access to employment and entrepreneurship.

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities exploiting 6,800 tax changes for identification. Using event study designs and difference-in-differences models, we find that workers bear about one-half of the total tax burden. Administrative linked employer-employee data allow us to estimate heterogeneous firm and worker effects. Our findings highlight the importance of labor market institutions and profit-shifting opportunities for the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. Moreover, we show that low-skilled, young, and female employees bear a larger share of the tax burden. This has important distributive implications.

This article argues that the concept of “hedging” should be understood in the context of the “balancing-bandwagoning” spectrum within the “balance of power” theory, in which hedging is located between balancing and bandwagoning as the state’s third strategic choice. Although polarity—unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar—largely determines the likelihood of hedging behavior, during a period of power shift, strategic uncertainty emerges. States, particularly secondary powers, attempt to calculate the risk of balancing, bandwagoning, and hedging, adopting an optimal strategy. To identify states’ strategic behavior, it is important to first examine their economic and military capabilities, and if these indicators are not decisive enough to identify balancing, bandwagoning, or hedging behavior, diplomatic factors should be taken into account, although those are a relatively weaker indicator. The use of this conceptual framework reveals that Japan’s foreign policy behavior has not involved “hedging” vis-à-vis China; instead, Japan’s behavior is consistently associated with “balancing” against the risks of China’s rise. In addition, while Japan’s behavior vis-à-vis the United States is considered to be bandwagoning, Japan made political efforts to strengthen its own military capabilities—internal balancing—which began in the 2010s when Japan relaxed its political constraints on use of its military. This behavior also aimed both to illustrate Japan’s efforts related to alliance burden-sharing and to enhance its external balancing with the United States. Yet, the periods from 1997 to 2005 and from 2010 on represent an aberration because Japan engaged one type of hedging—security hedging—vis-à-vis the risk of US commitment reduction to East Asia. In this sense, while concurring with the realists’ argument that Japan’s current behavior is characterized as balancing, the argument differs from that of realists who believe that Japan’s policy shift to balancing toward China only began with China’s rise in the late 2000s or 2010s.

After the long domination of economic and collective action theories, the literature on the political aspects of Allied burden-sharing is growing. This article analyses the politics of fair-share in NATO from the perspective of Canadian officials during the first burden-sharing debates in 1949-1952. I focus on sense-making and, through an interpretive methodology, I reconstruct the Canadian discourse on fair-share. This article shows that for Canada sharing NATO's burden was not only a matter of technicality or realist considerations; in order to make NATO burden-sharing work, the allies needed to balance three dimensions of collective defence burden: military, economic, and moral.