Faculty Sponsor: Mary Alice Haddad
Abstract: Diplomacy, conventionally thought to be the mechanism between states to manage international relationships, increasingly, became observable between cities/regions. In the recent decade, many cities in the United States have established an office or unit directly responsible for international affairs. This project intends to capture the relationship between city diplomacy and economic growth. The number of sister cities, the number of consulates, affiliation with international organizations, and what kind of city office presence were operationalized to measure the city diplomacy. Personal income(pc), and population data were used for controls, and export change data was used to operationalize the growth. The results of regression analysis showed that there could be a significant positive relationship between the number of sister cities and consulates to export increase. Nevertheless, export growth is only one aspect of economic growth, and city diplomacy could also be operationalized in other terms. This project aims for more extensive exploration and is estimated to end before the end of this year. For the remaining time, variables such as FDI, airport/port volume, and the number of Memorandum of Understanding between a U.S. city and a foreign entity will be included in the analysis. Further, the project might expand to have time-series data and the corresponding analysis to show more clearly the