Political factors in international economics: an overview

Abstract

The intellectual interaction between politics and economics is not new. Theolder term to describe what economists do—political economy— which until recently survived only in French translation and on the masthead of one of the premier professional journals, is a case in point. A more pertinent example is provided by developments over the past two decades in the field of industrial organization, the shift from an exclusively public-interest view of economic regulation to one in which regulation is seen as the result of interaction between utility-maximizing politicians and various interest groups. 1 The extension of such ideas to international economics is, I believe, both necessary and desirable. And, as these papers indicate, with the right experimental design, it can also prove highly illuminating.