Explaining Citizen Support for Trade Liberalization

This paper examines individual attitudes in six industrialized democracies to determine what factors condition citizens' support for trade liberalization. We argue that public support for trade liberalization is influenced by politically driven views and individual economic utilitarian considerations. To test our propositions, we develop and estimate a series of logistic regression models of public support for trade liberalization. That data are derived from The World Values Surveys (1995–1997). We find strong empirical support for the economic utilitarian factors—primarily education, but also gender and income—as the principal factors shaping individual attitudes toward trade liberalization. Conversely, while some empirical support is found for political factors such as one's geographic orientation and level of cognitive mobilization, we find that the political predictors of support are weaker overall than the economic interest predictors.     

Political-economic problems in trade capacity building

Theoretically, trade capacity building should contribute to export-led growth and support liberal economic policies. Unfortunately, it often fails to meet this ideal due to resource misallocation, misplaced focus on existing obligations, and donor-driven implementation. This article presents a formal theory of political-economic problems in trade capacity building. I analyze trade liberalization as a repeated game with imperfect public monitoring between a developed and developing country. Modeling trade capacity building as an investment by the developed country, I show that it suffers from two problems. First, the need to enforce trade liberalization drives resource misallocation: costly projects are implemented only to build commitment capacity while others are not implemented because they encourage protectionism. Second, donor interests distort trade capacity building. Counterintuitively, if the donor can seek compensation from the recipient when it violates international trade law, it sometimes refuses to invest in low-cost trade capacity building while funding projects that hurt the recipient.     

印度对外贸易自由化模式改革的启示

始于20世纪90年代的印度对外贸易自由化模式改革为我国对外贸易发展模式的调整提供了诸多有益的启示：首先,我国调整外贸模式时应把握住贸易自由化的方向和限度;其次,我国应积极构建适应WTO的贸易政策体系,在外贸中争取主动;最后,我国应注重产业结构调整和产品升级,才能有力支撑对外贸易。     

中韩农业贸易中的政治性贸易保护问题研究

在中日韩三国自由贸易区谈判即将召开的情况下,韩国农业领域的贸易保护问题已经成为阻碍中韩FTA签订的重要问题。韩国农业领域的贸易保护倾向不仅根源于福利国家体制和国家干预制度,还和韩国独特的历史和现实政治情况紧密关联,这就要求我国政府在解决该问题时除了遵循FTA基本原则外,更要兼顾社会和政治方面的对韩协调,整合中国农业出口部门,实现对农业领域自由贸易的政治护持。     

Trade at the margin: Estimating the economic implications of preferential trade agreements

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become the most prevalent form of international trade liberalization in recent decades, even though it remains far from clear what their effects on economies and their key units, firms, are. This paper evaluates the distributional consequences of trade liberalization within industries differentiating two distinct aspects in which trade liberalization could result in higher trade flows: the intensive vs. the extensive margin of trade. In particular, we analyze whether trade liberalization leads to increased trade flows because either firms trade more volume in products they have already traded before (intensive margin) or because they start to trade products they have not traded previously (extensive margin), or both. We test these arguments for the Dominican Republic–Central America–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and exporting firms based in Costa Rica for the time-period 2008–2014. The results of our study suggest that the effects of CAFTA-DR depend not only on whether we analyze the extensive versus the intensive margin of trade but also whether the product in question is homogenous or differentiated and whether the exporting firm under analysis is small or large. In particular, we find support for the theoretical expectation that firms exporting heterogeneous products, such as textiles, gain from trade agreements, such as CAFTA-DR, in that they can export more varieties of their products. Yet at the same time, they tend to lose at the intensive margin by a reduction in their trade volume while the opposite pattern occurs for firms exporting homogenous products.     

Economics,security, and individual-level preferences for trade agreements

Empirical research on the determinants of individual-level support for trade liberalization has focused almost entirely on the economic effects of trade. Yet, international relations scholarship has long recognized that commerce also has a variety of security implications. This paper explores if and when security considerations influence individual attitudes toward trade. In this study, we ask two questions: First, to what extent do expectations about the security implications of trade affect individual-level attitudes toward trade agreements? Second, does the introduction of security concerns into the discussion of trade agreements influence how heavily individuals weigh their economic costs and benefits? We employ an original experiment embedded in a conjoint survey to investigate the relative impact of a variety of economic and security considerations on respondents’ support for trade. Our findings suggest that security information matters and undermines the appeal of some, though not all, economic arguments for trade liberalization among our respondents.     

东盟自由贸易区服务贸易自由化的法律规划探析

由于世界服务贸易的迅猛发展,服务贸易对国际贸易和世界经济增长的作用日趋重要.从上世纪90年代初以来,全球及区域贸易安排中逐步掀起了服务贸易自由化的浪潮.在此背景下,东盟开始启动区内服务贸易自由化进程,区域服务贸易取得了较快发展.1995年至2005年,东盟国家服务贸易出口从643亿美元增加到1030亿美元,增长60.2%;进口从741亿美元增加到1297亿美元,增长75.0%.1999年9月的东盟经济部长会议使各成员国对东盟自由贸易区(AFTA)服务贸易自由化的短期和长期目标有了统一认识:AFTA服务贸易自由化的短期目标是达成所有成员国的服务部门承诺减让;而长期目标是要实现区域内所有服务部门的一体化和所有服务贸易提供方式的自由化.可见,AFTA的服务贸易自由化已迈人了新的发展时期,自由化进程加快.     

What Kinds of Trade Liberalization Agreements Do People in Developing Countries Want?

One of the most striking developments in the global economy in the past decades is the rapid proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), with many of them concluded among or with participation of developing countries. On the presumption that current popular debates on trade policy are not so much about whether citizens want free trade but rather what kinds of trade liberalization they want, we examine individual trade policy preferences with regard to PTAs that can vary in content along several dimensions. To that end we carried out conjoint choice experiments embedded in representative surveys in three developing countries that differ strongly in income levels, political system, and trade liberalization history: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. We conceptualize trade policy preferences as preferences over the scale and scope of trade liberalization, environmental and labor standards, and labor market access (migration). Two main findings emerge. First, non-economic considerations, such as sympathy/antipathy toward particular countries and environmental and labor rights concerns influence citizens’ preferences at least as much as factors based on standard economic logic. Second, preferences over particular facets (attributes) of trade liberalization, that is PTA content, are surprisingly consistent across countries, despite strong differences in macro-economic and political context.     

The Social Construction of Policy Reform: Economists and Trade Liberalization Around the World

We argue that the global spread of ideas contributes to trade liberalization. Building on insights from a rich case-based literature, we suggest an explicit mechanism of trade policy diffusion: US-trained Ph.D. economists, who share a common belief in the benefits of free trade, and who operate with varying degrees of political influence around the world. We offer the first cross-national test of the impact of economists on trade liberalization using a unique dataset recording the country of residence of all 6,493 foreign-based, US-trained American Economic Association (AEA) members over the period 1981–1997. Specifically, we measure the influence of economists on the timing and extent of trade liberalization. First, we endogenize the date of trade liberalization using hazard and probit models. Controlling for alternative diffusion mechanisms and other confounding variables, our results suggest that economists significantly speed up the reform process. Second, we find that countries with greater numbers of economists are more open to trade at the end of the period. All of our results are robust to an instrumental variables strategy that employs the number of Fulbright grants allocated by the United States as an instrument for the number of US-trained economists.     

Democratic Convergence and Free Trade

Even if a democracy were more likely to pursue free trade than an autocracy (an unproven generalization), the simultaneous spread of democracy in the world would not necessarily yield a reduction in protection, but might in fact cause an increase. The reason for this paradoxical outcome is the fact that democratic convergence creates power profiles identical across nations. Similar regimes tend to empower the same classes of producers, with the result that if trade is based on relative comparative advantages, and countries specialize on the basis of factor endowments, democratic convergence (or any type of regime convergence for that matter) empowers as many free traders as protectionists, with negative consequences for trade; only if trade is fueled by scale economies, and countries specialize along product lines, then may political convergence not hurt trade. Empirically, I show that this model helps explain the timing of nineteenth-century European trade liberalization better than existing explanations; it also helps us understand the easiness with which liberalization proceeded in the postwar era; and it casts a new light on the difficulties presently encountered, with democracy spreading at a time when product specialization is on the retreat.     

Democracy,human rights,and U.S.‐Africa trade

The nexus of economic and political relations is a central issue in international relations, and the influence of political liberalization upon trade ties lies at the center of much liberal theory. However, many facets of the empirical linkage between political liberalization—including democratization and the respect for human rights—and trade remain uninvestigated. Examining the case of U.S.‐Africa trade, this study considers two unexplored facets of these political determinants of trade: (1) the role of human rights conditions, and (2) the robustness of the relationship between democracy, human rights, and trade across a subset of vertical dyads. Using a gravity model to assess trade patterns, we find that neither democracy nor human rights conditions has a significant impact upon U.S. trade to Africa.     

中国—新加坡自由贸易协定框架下中国服务贸易开放承诺与实践

中国共产党第十八届三中全会决定提出,放开服务业市场准入限制是当前和未来我国改革开放的重点之一。新加坡是中国在东南亚地区重要的经贸合作伙伴之一。评估中国—新加坡服务贸易协定框架下中国服务贸易承诺情况,分析中国服务贸易自由化实践情况,对于下一步推进中国服务贸易自由化进程具有重要意义。     

RCEP在推动东亚区域合作中的作用与新课题

区域全面经济伙伴关系协定(RCEP)对亚洲经济体进一步提升区域贸易投资自由化水平、促进形成区域一体化市场、改善区域综合发展环境具有积极意义。与此同时,RCEP也存在着进一步升级探索经贸新规则、推动区域内部国家进一步参与价值链分工以及提高自由贸易协定利用水平等一系列提升空间。未来一段时期内,以RCEP为重要内容的亚洲区域经济一体化进程将稳定发展,RCEP成员方需要积极加强国际合作,推动RCEP落地生效并发挥应有作用,为区域经济增长和全球经贸发展作出更大贡献。     

Trade Liberalization and Environmental Protection

Since the 1970s, environmental issues have gradually assumed importance in trade discussions. Trade liberalization and environmental protection have become increasingly interlinked because of the marked development of international trade and its seriously degrading effect on the environment. The WTO, as the sole international organization regulating trade, has inevitably come into the spot light. A clear reference to the importance of sustainable development lies in the preamble of the WTO and in the establishment of a new Committee on Trade and Environment （CTE）. However, the role of the WTO in this issue is still hotly debated. Liberalists maintain that the WTO, as a trade-regulating body, has gone too far in environmental protection whilst environmentalists claim that the WTO has not gone far enough. This paper attempts to analyze the role of the w-ro in the complicated linkage between trade liberalization and environmental protection, concluding that only under certain circumstances can the WTO play an active role in making trade liberalization and environmental protection mutually supportive.     

建立中韩FTA过程中的农产品贸易安排构想

确定双方均可接受的农产品自由贸易安排,是建立中韩FTA过程中面临的最复杂的挑战之一。从中韩两国农业发展水平和资源禀赋状况看,实现中韩农产品贸易自由化对于中国具有更大的利益,既是中国推动中韩FTA的核心目标之一,也是提高中国农产品在韩国竞争能力及解决双方农产品贸易争端的重要措施。但是,韩国政府对农产品贸易自由化始终持谨慎态度,主要是担心农产品自由贸易可能对其农业产业造成冲击、危及其粮食安全,并带来较大的政治风险。为此,双方应在建立FTA过程中就农产品贸易问题进行积极磋商与谈判,确立起合理的农产品贸易安排,具体内容包括确立农产品贸易自由化的合理范围和时间步骤安排、设置合理保障机制与争端解决机制、建立"最惠国待遇"机制等。     

Are Free Trade Areas Good for Multilateralism? Evidence from the European Free Trade Association

Do free trade agreements (FTAs) help or hinder multilateral trade liberalization? This question, though much debated, remains unanswered because (1) there has been scant attention to the conditions under which FTAs have either effect, and (2) extant hypotheses have not been rigorously tested. In this article I identify conditions under which FTAs help and hinder broader trade liberalization: they do the former when members' intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages are similar and the latter when the opposite is true. I test these hypotheses using trade, output, and tariff data from the European Free Trade Association. The trade data indicate that members with similar intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages liberalized trade more rapidly than those with dissimilar comparative advantages. The output and tariff data suggest that these differences among members reflect hypothesized economic and political processes. My research implies that scholars should abandon universalistic arguments concerning the effects of regional arrangements and devote more attention to the conditions governing the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism.     

The Electoral Salience of Trade Policy: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Welfare and Complexity

Why do some trade policies become electorally salient while others do not? While much of the literature argues that citizens act as a domestic constraint in the formation of trade policy, a general consensus has emerged that trade is most often a nonsalient issue among voters. This poses a paradox. On the one hand, trade models hinge upon voters’ rational self-interest and preferences for varying levels of protectionism to keep their governments accountable. On the other hand, the conditions by which trade becomes salient to these very voters in the first place are both undertheorized and untested. Using experimental evidence, I argue that two dimensions of a trade policy affect the likelihood of that issue becoming electorally salient. First, policies with large welfare effects should be more salient. Second, more complex issues should be less salient because such agreements are more likely to obfuscate an individual’s ability to discern its effects. I find support for my hypotheses that a trade policy’s salience tends to increase with the magnitude of its welfare effects and decrease with its complexity.     

Tariffs and Carbon Emissions

International trade and the environment are uneasy partners. Both environmentalists and free traders worry that the pursuit of one goal may obstruct the other. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the area of climate change. Does trade liberalization increase carbon emissions? Do efforts to reduce carbon emissions lead to protectionist pressures? This paper addresses these questions by examining the relationship between CO2 emissions and tariffs in 109 to 153 countries from 1988 to 2013. Using instrumental-variable regressions to address reciprocal causation, I find that emissions reductions led to higher tariffs on manufactured goods. This suggests that carbon-intensive industries responded to carbon restrictions by lobbying against trade liberalization. In contrast, emissions did not affect tariffs on less carbon-intensive primary products, and neither type of tariff affected CO2 emissions. My results imply that efforts to combat climate change may obstruct trade liberalization, but the latter should not hinder climate change mitigation.     

新贸易环境下中韩FTA促进战略评析

中韩建交20年来,双边经贸关系发展迅速。近年来,随着中韩贸易环境的变化,两国出于经济、政治、安全利益的需要,在进一步加强合作以缔结中韩FTA方面逐渐达成共识,继而推动中韩FTA步入实施阶段。中韩FTA生效后,将会给两国带来巨大的经济效应,预计对两国GDP增长、消费者福利增加、市场占有率提高等都会产生积极影响。中韩两国处在不同的产业发展阶段,在贸易自由化程度和范围方面存在着差异。在谈判过程中,两国还会存在不少争论焦点,对于具体实行效果也会存在一些担忧,有待两国本着合作互利的原则通过协商加以解决。     

拉美国家的贸易开放度研究

贸易开放是经济现代化的基本特征之一,GATT以及WTO等一些国际经济秩序的基本构成机制进一步推动了全球的贸易自由化,背离这一秩序或者趋势的结果是无法从他国的市场开放中获得益处。在出口导向战略实施了多年之后,目前拉美主要国家的贸易开放到底达到了一个什么样的程度正是我们所困惑的问题。本文以亚洲7个国家作为参照组,研究了1995年至2009年拉美7个国家(阿根廷、巴西、哥伦比亚、智利、墨西哥、秘鲁和委内瑞拉)的贸易开放程度。主要结论是,最近10多年,7个拉美国家的贸易开放度有了显著而稳步的上升,但与亚洲国家相比,拉美国家的贸易开放程度普遍略低。本文对于研究拉美国家经济开放程度与经济增长、国际贸易体制以及国内产业发展之间的关系,特别是中拉经贸关系发展前景等问题都具有基础性和阶段性的意义。