Constituent Interests And Us Trade Policies

The contributors to this volume, economists and political scientists from academic institutions, the private sector, and the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, came together to discuss an important topic in the formation of U.S. international trade policy: the representation of constituent interests. In the resulting volume they address the objectives of groups who participate in the policy process and examine how each group's interests are identified and promoted. They look at what means are used for these purposes, and the extent to which the groups' objectives and behavior conform to how the political economy of trade policy is treated in the economic and political science literature. Further, they discuss how effective each group has been. Each of the book's five parts offers a coherent view of important components of the topic. Part I provides an overview of the normative and political economy approaches to the modeling of trade policies. Part 2 discusses the context of U.S. trade policies. Part 3 deals with the role of sectoral producing interests, including the relationship of trade policy to auto, steel, textile, semiconductor, aircraft, and financial services. Part 4 examines other constituent interests, including the environment, human rights, and the media. Part 5 provides commentary on such issues as the challenges that trade policy poses for the new administration and the 105th Congress. The volume ultimately offers important and more finely articulated questions on how trade policy is formed and implemented. Contributors are Robert E. Baldwin, Jagdish Bhagwati, Douglas A. Brook, Richard O. Cunningham, Jay Culbert, Alan V. Deardorff, I. M. Destler, Daniel Esty, Geza Feketekuty, Harry Freeman, John D. Greenwald, Gene Grossman, Richard L. Hall, Jutta Hennig, John H. Jackson, James A. Levinsohn, Mustafa Mohatarem, Robert Pahre, Richard C. Porter, Gary R. Saxonhouse, Robert E. Scott, T. N. Srinivasan, Robert M. Stern, Joe Stroud, John Sweetland, Raymond Waldmann, Marina v.N. Whitman, and Bruce Wilson. Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.

Scholars have argued that constituent interests and political parties affect voting on trade policy legislation in the U.S. Congress. The existing empirical research on trade policy voting, however, has not utilized research designs that allow us to disentangle how constituents and parties affect legislative voting. In this paper we apply one-to-one matching research designs to compare the effects of constituency and party on trade policy voting in both the U.S. House and Senate. The research design allows us to account for a variety of different constituent factors that could influence voting, and then determine if party has any effect beyond constituent interests. The results suggest that party plays a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy once we account for constituency effects. Between 1824 and 1930, political party almost completely determines trade policy votes and although the effect of party is weaker since 1930 it is still significant. These results suggest that to understand the political economy of trade policy we need to incorporate the way that partisan politics affects trade policy.

To citizens and political analysts alike, United States trade law is an incoherent conglomeration of policies, both liberal and protectionist. Seeking to understand the contradictions in American policy, Judith Goldstein offers the first book to demonstrate the impact of the political past on today's trade decisions. As she traces the history of trade agreements from the antebellum era through the 1980s, she addresses a fundamental question: What effects do shared ideas about economics—as opposed to national power or individual self-interest—have on the institutions that make and enforce trade law? Goldstein argues that successful ideas become embedded in institutions and typically outlive the time during which they served social interests. She sets the stage with a discussion of the shifting commercial policy of the first half of the nineteenth century. After examining the consequences of the Republican party's decision to promote high tariffs between 1870 and 1930, she then considers in detail the political aftermath of the Great Depression, when the Democratic party settled on a reciprocal trade platform. Because the Democrats did not completely dismantle the existing system, however, the combined legacies of protection and openness help explain the intricacies in the forms of protectionism that political leaders have advocated since World War II. Readers in such fields as political science, political economy, policy studies and law, international relations, and American history will welcome Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy.

Americans have witnessed inconsistent and seemingly dramatic turnabouts in legislators' attitudes toward trade, with strong bipartisan support for free trade and the Uruguay Round in one instant and heated debate over participation in the World Trade Organization the next. Martha L. Gibson systematically traces the competing forces that interject conflict into an overall consensus on the value of a liberalized trade policy. Cutting through the tangled web of congressional politics, Gibson shows why it is impossible to understand trade legislation without first understanding how electoral politics and the institutional rules of Congress distort legislators' interests, incentives, and policy goals. Gibson's book clearly shows that trade legislation is not made in a vacuum but is just one in a series of simultaneous games with competing goals in which legislators engage to satisfy the conflicting demands of constituents.

This chapter introduces the proceedings of a conferences held on November 8-9, 1996, in Ann Arbor, MI, honoring John Sweetland and his late wife, Gayle, for the generous gift commitments that they have made to the Michigan Department of Economics. The academic purpose of the conference was to examine how constituent interests in the private sector, non-profit sector, and government interact to determine United States international trade policy.

Our paper is designed to provide the context for the theme of the conference, "The Representation of Constituent Interests in the Design and Implementation of U.S. Trade Policies." We begin by reviewing the normative and political economy approaches to the modeling of trade policies. We identify the major limitations of these approaches and then discuss what Dixit (1996) has referred to as the "transaction-cost approach," which may provide a middle ground between the other approaches and enable us to address some hitherto imperfectly understood issues of trade policy. We also include a brief discussion of the empirical literature pertinent to the normative and political economy approaches. We then turn to a sketch of the main features of the U.S. trade-policy process, focusing in particular on the roles played by the agencies of government together with the important constituent interest groups in the U.S. economy. We consider how these can be interpreted in the light of the modeling approaches, and we also ask what can be learned from the past half-century of U.S. trade policy experiences.

Congress plays a major role in U.S. trade policy through its legislative and oversight authority. There are a number of major trade issues that are currently the focus of Congress. For example, bills were introduced in the 113th Congress to reauthorize Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Congress has also been involved with proposed free trade agreements (FTAs), including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving the United States and 11 other countries and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union (EU). Also of interest to Congress are current plurilateral negotiations for a Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and a new multilateral Information Technology (ITA) agreement in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade and investment policies of major U.S. trading partners (such as China), especially when they are deemed harmful to U.S. economic interests, are also of continued concern to Congress. Events in the Ukraine have prompted U.S. trade sanctions against Russia. The costs and benefits of trade to the U.S. economy, firms, workers, and constituents, and the future direction of U.S. trade policy, are hotly debated topics in Congress. This report provides information and context for these and many other trade topics. It is intended to assist Members and staff who may be new to trade issues. The report is divided into four sections in a question-and-answer format: trade concepts; U.S. trade performance; formulation of U.S. trade policy; and trade and investment issues. Additional suggested readings are provided in an appendix. The first section, "Trade Concepts," deals with why countries trade, the consequences of trade expansion, and the relationship between globalization and trade. Key questions address the benefits of specialization in production and trade, efforts by governments to influence a country's comparative advantage, how trade expansion can be costly and disruptive to workers in some industries, and some unique characteristics of trade between developed countries. The second section, "U.S. Trade Performance," lists data on U.S. trade flows and focuses on the U.S. trade deficit, including its implications for the U.S. economy. Questions address the causes of trade deficits, the role of foreign trade barriers, and how the trade deficit might be reduced. The third section, "Formulation of U.S. Trade Policy," deals with the roles played by the executive branch, Congress, the private sector, and the judiciary in the formulation of U.S. trade policy. Information on how trade policy functions are organized in Congress and the executive branch, as well as the respective roles of individual Members and the President, is provided. The roles of the private sector and the judiciary are also discussed.

From American master Ward Just, returning to his trademark territory of "Forgetfulness "and "The Weather in Berlin," an evocative portrait of diplomacy and desire set against the backdrop of America's first lost war

This paper assesses the major developments in U.S. trade policies since the creation of the WTO in 1995. It is based in large measure on the fourth biannual (1996) WTO Trade Policy Review of the United States and updated through 1997. The discussion and assessments include in particular: the major U.S. multilat-eral trade-policy issues and activities centered in the WTO: issues and activities relating to NAFTA; U.S. bilateral trade relations with its major trading partners; administration of U.S. trade laws and regulations; and U.S. agricultural trade policies.