Global cooperation and a strong United Nations (UN) system are needed to implement shared global goals such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. For the first time, we present a new index of Nation-States’ support for UN-based multilateralism (UN-Mi) based on the principles established in the UN Charter in 1945. We use six headline indicators and follow best practices to verify the statistical validity and robustness of our construct. Our findings suggest that there are significant differences in countries’ support for UN-based multilateralism. Some large economic powers showcase low and declining support for UN-based multilateralism. The poor performance of the United States and some of its allies suggests that the concepts of “Rules-Based-International Order” and “UN-based multilateralism” are truly distinct, and arguably, even opposite, frameworks. Our statistical analysis confirms that the UN-Mi captures something different than other existing constructs that aim to capture, for instance, the size of diplomatic networks or people's confidence in the UN.

This paper aims to explain the growth experiences of 14 major states of India between 1980 and 1998. Using two measures of convergence, σ-convergence and ß-convergence, we examine whether per capita incomes in the states have been converging or diverging. By both standards of convergence, India demonstrated overall divergence during 1980–98, as well as during both the pre-reform and post-reform subperiods. Interestingly, the richer states experienced a degree of convergence during the post-reform period, whereas the poorer states did not. Divergence was most notable within the poorer group of states. A remarkable 82 percent of the cross-state variation in growth is explained by just the urbanization variable in India, with no hint of any conditional convergence after controlling for the degree of urbanization. The regression estimate shows that a 10 percentage point higher rate of urbanization is associated with 1.3 percentage points per year higher rate of annual growth.

Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996–99. Their respective contributions in percentage points were 2.5 and 3.5 for the province-level metropolises, 0.6 and 2.3 for the northeastern provinces, 2.8 and 2.8 for the coastal provinces, 2.0 and 1.6 for the central provinces, 0 and 1.6 for the northwestern provinces, and 0.1 and 1.8 for the southwestern provinces. Because the so-called preferential policies are largely deregulation policies that have allowed coastal Chinese provinces to integrate into the international economy, it is far superior to reduce regional disparity by extending these deregulation policies to the interior provinces than by re-regulating the coastal provinces. Two additional inhibitions to income convergence are the household registration system, which makes the movement of the rural poor to prosperous areas illegal, and the monopoly state bank system that, because of its bureaucratic nature, disburses most of its funds to its large traditional customers, few of whom are located in the western provinces. Improving infrastructure to overcome geographic barriers is fundamental to increasing western growth, but increasing human capital formation (education and medical care) is also crucial because only it can come up with new better ideas to solve centuries-old problems like unbalanced growth.