Description
International trade offers opportunities and risks to countries, groups, and individuals. Opening an economy up to trade with other economies provides potential advantages for all, as it allows for specialization that leads to higher levels of productivity and efficiency, enlarges the markets available to firms, and increases the scope for consumer choice. However, the process of specialization entails redeployment of assets that is costly for some actors, and exposure to the global economy can create new sources of risk. For these reasons, trade is highly politicized. No government in the modern state system has ever pursued an entirely hands-off approach to trade policy. This volume features chapters that view the politics of international trade from a wide variety of angles. It considers the concepts that have driven trade policy, the interests that compete over it, and the institutions that channel these interests. The actors that care about trade policy range from individuals and firms to interest groups, government agencies, and international institutions. Economists have made great strides in understanding the factors that create a demand for international trade and the economic consequences of trade for various actors. Many of the approaches studied in this volume build on such economic models. However, the focus here is very much on politics: who wins and who loses from different policies, who is able to organize and to influence governments, and thus how politics influences actual patterns of trade.
In this introductory chapter I provide some historical and conceptual background to the more advanced theoretical perspectives and sophisticated empirical work showcased in the rest of the volume. The next section looks at the progression of eras of trade policy, from the mercantilism that emerged along with the modern state system to today’s landscape of global, regional, and bilateral trade institutions. The third section turns to theories, providing an overview of economic models of trade that help us understand the interests that go into making trade policy and the domestic and international institutions that aggregate these interests. Finally, I briefly discuss the organization of this volume.