Yuzi Huang

Yuzi Huang is a visiting student at ODID and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Area Studies, Peking University. She is also an assistant at the Centre for American Studies and a research assistant at the Think Tank of the Institute of Area Studies in Peking University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Vietnamese, with a minor in International Politics, from the University of International Business and Economics (2018). 

Her research interests lie at the intersection of international political economy, the political economy of development, and Southeast Asian studies. She focuses on economic development and transformation in developing countries, trade, and foreign direct investment, with particular attention to Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

At ODID, she will further develop her research on the factors that shape developing countries’ success or failure in acceding to international institutions. Her doctoral dissertation draws on processes of developing-country accession to major international economic institutions since the Second World War, together with treaty negotiation texts, to argue that the club-good characteristics of international institutions have weakened over time. Building on this argument, she combines expectation theory and revealed preference theory to explain why some developing countries are able to join international institutions while others are not. She will test her theoretical hypotheses through comparative case analysis and process tracing, focusing on Southeast Asian countries.