Trade Politics Research Articles

Social and Political Drivers of the Reorientation of U.S. Trade Policy: The Case of U.S. Withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Previous sociological studies demonstrated that U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) had durable political power to motivate U.S. trade policy. However, why did the United States switch from a “free trade” to an “America First” trade agenda? Economists and political scientists argue that protectionist voters elected the protectionist candidate—Trump. An alternative sociological explanation is that U.S. MNCs lost political power to competing stakeholder groups. The article uses qualitative and quantitative methods to test these competing theories using the case study of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The article argues that both theories are necessary, and neither are sufficient. The United States withdrew from the TPP because increasing negative effects of trade and investment in the United States reshaped trade politics, especially on the republican side; however, power relations between stakeholder groups had to shift as well. U.S. MNCs lost political influence over trade policy to new domestic manufacturing organizations and their networks with labor and fair trade coalitions.

The rise and fall and rise of the trans-pacific partnership: 21st century trade politics through a new constitutionalist lens

The trans-pacific partnership (TPP) has been hailed as a bold step in trade diplomacy, a gold standard agreement which not only opens markets but also boosts labor and environmental protections. Despite its future being put in doubt by the US’ withdrawal, the TPP continues without it, touted as a ‘model’ agreement to shape trade politics in the coming years. To understand the rise and fall and rise of the TPP, this article analyses it through the framework of ‘new constitutionalism’: a set of judicial and institutional mechanisms that insulate transnational capital from democratic accountability, while also opening up new spaces for accumulation and co-opting resistance. Within this framework, the TPP is understood as an instrument of crisis management, attempting to preserve the rights of capital and stimulate accumulation in response to the post-2008 crisis, while also seeking to quell the backlash against free trade by addressing labor and environmental concerns. It is this duality, however, which undermines the success of the agreement. While on the one hand the TPP aims to foreclose progressive options for governance, at the same time, it opens up spaces from which neoliberal hegemony can be contested, empowering a diverse coalition to challenge the agreement.

The Unintended Consequences of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Negotiations

ABSTRACTAlthough stalled since 2016, the negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have had major unintended consequences. The TTIP led to demands from third countries to upgrade their trade relationship with the EU and to unprecedented politicisation. As second-order effects of the latter, it endangered the EU-Canada trade agreement and brought about reform of EU trade governance and amendments to EU trade policy positions. These unintended consequences occurred because of inflated expectations about and insufficient awareness of the different nature of TTIP with regard to scope and partner compared to other trade negotiations. In the meantime, EU trade policy has adapted to the new politics of trade, making unintended consequences less likely.

The dollar and the demand for protection

ABSTRACTPostwar trade politics in the USA have exhibited intermittent periods of rising industry demands for protection from imports. At present, however, we do not fully understand why industry demands for protection rise and fall overtime. We argue that intermittent protectionism in postwar USA has been driven by changes in the real exchange rate. To do so, we incorporate the real exchange rate into a basic model of sectoral trade policy preferences to show how the number of sectors that expect to benefit from protection grows as the real exchange rate appreciates. We test two hypotheses generated from this model: first that the number of antidumping and escape clause petitions rises as the dollar strengthens and falls as the dollar weakens. Second that competitive sectors are more sensitive to exchange rate movements than comparatively disadvantaged and comparatively advantaged sectors. We evaluate these expectations with a Bayesian statistical analysis of data on antidumping and escape clause petitions in the USA between 1974 and 2012. The empirical models provide robust support for the study’s principal hypotheses.

Do Electoral Campaigns Influence Public Support for Trade? Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Election

The open-economy politics of trade presumes that elections, as a political institution, aggregate preferences of individual voters to resolve a salient trade cleavage in a democratic society. This presumption, despite being widely applied to analytical narratives of trade politics in the existing literature, has not been empirically tested. The 2016 US presidential election is unique in this regard; trade policy became a politically salient issue, and was treated as such during the electoral campaign. We exploit two waves of a nationally-representative panel survey conducted before and after the 2016 US presidential election to identify the effect of electoral campaigns on the change in public support for trade in general and trade agreements in particular. In contrast with the conventional wisdom, we find that the election and presidential campaigns not only aggregate preexisting individual preferences for trade, but also affect public support for trade. Our main result helps explain why political candidates continue to include trade as an electoral plank when campaigning. It also suggests that trade preferences of individual voters are more endogenous to domestic political institutions and contemporary political dynamics -- in this case, the presidential election and campaigns -- than previously assumed in the literature.

Global Value Chains and Product Differentiation: Changing the Politics of Trade

AbstractBoth global value chains and trade in differentiated goods have become increasingly important in the international economy. We argue that these two developments interact in changing the political economy of trade. For finished goods, product differentiation facilitates trade liberalization because the adjustment costs of liberalization are lower when countries trade varieties of the same good. By contrast, for goods that are used as inputs in the production process, product differentiation makes trade liberalization more difficult. We find support for this argument in two tests. On the one hand, we look at patterns of lobbying on US preferential trade agreements (PTAs). On the other hand, we use a data set with highly disaggregated tariff data from 61 PTAs signed between 1995 and 2013. The paper contributes to the long‐standing debates on endogenous tariff formation and the consequences of intra‐industry trade, and a nascent literature on the relationship between global value chains and trade policy.

Polarization, the Great Recession, and the Trade Politics of America First: Domestic Sources of the Trump Administration's Trade Policy

Polarization, the Great Recession, and the Trade Politics of America First: Domestic Sources of the Trump Administration's Trade Policy

Japan and East Asian Integration: Trade and Domestic Politics

Japan and East Asian Integration: Trade and Domestic Politics

Empresas financieras y desarrollo humano integral

En el 50º aniversario de la publicación de la Encíclica Populorum Progressio, y frente a un escenario de política económica y comercial internacional caracterizado por unas crecientes fuerzas aislacionistas, el sector financiero propone una reflexión sobre la urgente necesidad de cambiar su paradigma funcional.
 Las reflexiones de la encíclica vuelven a ser de gran actualidad sobre todo en su atención hacia la cooperación entre pueblos y naciones en el mundo y el derecho de estos últimos al bienestar y al desarrollo humano integral.
 En la raíz de los problemas económicos y financieros de la economía global, encontramos tres enfermedades “filosóficas” que representan tres visiones distorsionadas de la persona, de la empresa y del valor. En contraposición proponemos las alternativas de los fondos éticos, la tutela de la biodiversidad bancaria, el voto con la cartera y una especial atención para los sistemas de remuneración de las figuras de poder en los bancos, empresas e intermediarios financieros.

BUDAYA POLITIK DALAM MASYARAKAT PRAGMATIS

General elections and regional head elections in Indonesia are conducted directly. The pattern of community participation is changed. The emergence of pragmatism or political pragmatism in society becomes an interesting political culture to study. Practically, pragmatism means a condition that encourages people to get benefits instantly. As a result, people take any actions to make it happen. In reality, pragmatism not only affects the upper classes (those with a high level of education) but also ordinary people (lower class society or those with low levels of political education). The development of money politics, cow trade politics, the sale of votes, or the existence of political dowry is a sign that there has been a political transaction becoming one of the indicators of pragmatism reality in society

Understanding EU trade politics after TTIP, Trump and Brexit

Understanding EU trade politics after TTIP, Trump and Brexit

The Arbitrage Lobby: Theory and Evidence on the Political Economy of Dual Exchange Rates

Foundational theories of trade politics emphasize a conflict between consumer welfare and protectionist lobbies. But these theories, developed to describe the United States, ignore other lobbies that shape trade policy elsewhere. We propose a theory of trade distortion arising from conflict between consumer welfare and importer lobbies. We estimate the key parameter of the model—the government’s weight on welfare—using original data from Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez used an exchange-rate subsidy to underwrite hundreds of billions of dollars of imports. Whereas estimates from traditional models would make Chavez look like a welfare maximizer, our results indicate that he implemented distortionary commercial policy to the benefit of special interests. Our analysis underscores the importance of tailoring U.S.-based models to account for differences in regime type and interest group configuration. The politics of commercial policy is not reducible to the politics of protectionism.

Professionalizing Protest: Scientific Capital and Advocacy in Trade Politics

A range of socio-economic dislocations have spawned renewed interest in the capitalist system and its critiques. Within these trends, the politics of international trade has often been a flashpoint for civil society organisations (CSOs) concerned with social justice. This paper uncovers a neglected feature of this landscape: how, since the 1980s, certain CSOs have shifted from being ‘radical outsiders’ to ‘reformist insiders’ to protest the design and purpose of global trade. We know why CSOs have criticised the political economy of trade, but less about how they have historically struggled to gain admission into this policy milieu; their internal strategising and tensions; and what makes for effective protest. To understand such experimentation, this paper argues that literature on professionalisation offers a valuable lens for exploring the relationship between expertise and power. Dovetailing with other research in IPS, it adapts Bourdieu's comparatively underused concept of scientific capital to explicate how certain, prized dispositional qualities were acquired and practiced for the purpose of registering policy impact. This argument is developed through the case of Oxfam. When viewed historically, the paper suggests that a professionalised, activist subjectivity has emerged within certain CSOs, defined here under a new ideal-type notion of the ‘critical technician’.

Trading with the enemy: narrative, identity and US trade politics

ABSTRACTMost scholars contend that ‘inside’ lobbying such as corporate money, campaign contributions and interest group ties to Congress shape trade policy outcomes. Some scholars also claim that ‘outside’ lobbying such as appealing to the US public through media and advertising campaigns is also critical especially for free trade success. Yet, little crossover exists between the trade literature on lobbying and the emerging IR foreign policy literature on narratives and how policy-maker ‘stories’ impact outcomes. This article helps rectify this gap by demonstrating how US pro-trade public lobbying campaigns rely on national identity narratives to successfully appease and appeal to the public and thus facilitate passage in Congress even when partner countries are negatively perceived. The article examines two cases of US trade liberalization campaigns with China and Russia to analyze how the negative domestic perception of the two potential partner countries impacted pro-trade narratives and shaped ‘outside’ lobbying strategies. Drawing on recent foreign policy literature on narratives and national identity, this article demonstrates how domestic actors rely on existing country images – even when negative – to emotionally empower trade policy arguments and ironically glean legislative success.

“The Indian Factors: Kinship, Trade, and Authority in the Creek Nation & American South, 1740–1800”

This article explores the lives of the countless “Indian Factors” who straddled Native and European worlds during the eighteenth century. For the most part, these individuals were born of mixed unions between European men and Creek women, and were employed as traders and intermediaries in the deerskin trade and Creek-British politics. However, after the Seven Years’ War, Indian factors triggered a political contest within the Creek Nation, by empowering younger generations of men who challenged micos—the traditional leaders—for authority in their communities. Such tension led to increasing violence with Europeans and contributed to the revolutionary crisis in the South. After 1783, factors again evolved in response to the threat of the United States, this time as voices of Creek sovereignty. All in all, Indian factors embodied the multifaceted definitions and transformative changes that swept the Creek world and the American South during the eighteenth century.

Plaintiffs by proxy: A firm-level approach to WTO dispute resolution

Lobbying by multinational business firms drives the agenda of international trade politics. We match Fortune Global 500 firms to WTO disputes in which they have a stake and to their political activities using public disclosure data. The quantitative evidence reveals traces of a principal-agent relationship between major MNCs and the US Trade Representative (USTR). Firms lobby and make political contributions to induce the USTR to lodge a WTO dispute, and once a dispute begins, firms increase their political activity in order to keep USTR on track. Lobbying is overwhelmingly patriotic—the side opposing the US position is barely represented—and we see little evidence of MNCs lobbying against domestic protectionism. When the United States is targeted in a dispute, lobbying by defendant-side firms substantially delays settlement, as the affected firms pressure the government to reject concessions. Lobbying on the complainant side does not delay dispute resolution, as complainant-side firms have mixed incentives, to resolve disputes quickly as well as to hold out for better terms.

Australia and a Post-Brexit Britain

This article, based on the Robert Menzies Lecture delivered by the author in London on 31 October 2017, provides a survey of Britain and Australia’s bilateral relationship from the 1930s to the present. In the earlier period particular attention is given to the role of Sir Robert Menzies. The relationship is examined in the light of Britain’s accession to the EEC/EU with reference to bilateral trade, security and global politics, and migration, with emphasis on strong people-to-people links. The author expresses hopes for renewed co-operation over free trade, a rules-based world outlook and links between universities in a post-Brexit world. He argues that although the bilateral relationship went through some troubled times in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it is now getting back to the natural strength that it deserves.

Plantations, Peddlers, and Nature Protection: The Transnational Origins of Indonesia's Orangutan Crisis, 1910–1930

AbstractThis article examines the geographies and politics of the global trade in orangutans in the name of science and entertainment in the first half of the twentieth century, along the background of the growing international nature protection movement. In doing so, it draws attention to historical processes that led to environmental conservation in northern Sumatra. It looks at some of the causes of the wildlife trade, linking animal-human engagement in northern Sumatra in the early twentieth century to large-scale agricultural development. During this period, wildlife traders brought shipments of orangutans from northern Sumatra to Europe and elsewhere around the world. The orangutan trade and the arrival of large numbers of apes in Europe broadly influenced material practices and decisions central to the colonial project. This included the tightening of borders and surveillance in the ports and on land, as well as the creation of wildlife protection laws and policies that regulated human relationships with the environment in colonial Indonesia.

LOJİSTİK SEKTÖRÜ VE TÜRKİYE DIŞ TİCARETİNE ETKİLERİ

With the globalization nowadays, in the result of intense competition and with the disapperance of all borders, reality of moving cheaper goods with the most minimum wage has come up. Hence; managing their supply chains and logistic activities more efficently and thriftily than their rivals will provide some advantages to businesses. Logistic sector in Turkey economy is as important as in the world economy. Fundamental reason for this is that decisions concerning logistic sector are crucial for country trade and rapid development of the sector as being one of the prominent sectors that creates jobs in Turkey and has a potantial to grow. Individual’s and government’s being constantly in various economic relationships brings international trade in new levels. Foreign trade, taking place globally, is attaching continents and bringing together buyers and sellers, apart from each other in a long distance, in a common platform. Therefore, countries can dominate their country’s economy by means of foreign trade politics that they apply. As of this point, foreign trade is not only important in terms of activity in trade that takes place with the rest of the world but also an important factor that provides the balance between domestic and foreign trade of the country’s economy. With the recent developments in the logistic sectors, logistic concept in Turkey has began more effective on transformation systems. In this study impacts of logistic sector that develops in Turkey on foreign trade has been examined

Abenomics and Japan's Trade Policy in a New Era

Trade policy, in particular, the Trans‐Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), has been a centerpiece of the Abe administration's economic strategy. The TPP's contributions to Japan's growth strategy include: (i) creating trade and investment opportunities abroad for Japanese companies through ambitious liberalization targets; (ii) advancing domestic reforms – with the largest service and agricultural liberalization commitments to date; and (iii) increasing bargaining leverage in other trade negotiations. But the domestic reform goals of Abenomics in agriculture have come up short due to opposition from domestic lobbies. American trade politics – which culminated in the US withdrawal from the TPP – have upended the goals of trade policy under Abenomics. Japan's best option in this new environment is to deliver on high quality, multi‐party trade agreements: concluding negotiations with Europe; scaling up the ambition of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership; and salvaging a TPP 11. The merits of a bilateral free trade agreement with the USA will depend on how the Trump administration operationalizes its America First policy.