Open-Economy Politics: The Political Economy of the World Coffee Trade. By Robert H. Bates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 221p. $59.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Abstract

For three decades political scientists have attempted to show that markets reflect the political institutions and politics within which they function. Also, many scholars have traced states' foreign economic policies to their domestic politics. Open-Economy Politics pushes both these projects forward with an extended case study of the world coffee market. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Robert Bates takes us chronologically through key shifts in policies of the chief coffee trading countries-Brazil, Colombia, and the United States-especially the formation, operation, and collapse of the International Coffee Organization from 1962 through 1982.