对美国贸易保护政策的思考

美国此次启动201条款,表明世界贸易组织还很脆弱,对于大国撇开世界贸易组织,而单方面采取制裁行动的行为 没有限制力。美国启动201条款,既是对世界贸易组织的不尊重,也是无视世界贸易组织成员的一种行为。此种举动,对作 为刚刚加入WTO的中国来说,不能不说是一种考验,为我国积极做好反倾销提供了一个很好的案例。     

Managing Value Conflict in Public Policy

Policy issues are often characterized by conflicting values. Conventionally, students of public policy have conceptualized government's response to value conflicts as a matter of "balancing" competing goals, or striking trade-offs among values. In this paper we argue that this way of managing value conflicts represents only one possibility from a larger and more varied repertoire of strategies that draw from more complex models of practical reasoning. Policy actors do sometimes try to strike a "balance" among conflicting values, but they often avail themselves of other strategies as well: they cycle between values by emphasizing one value and then the other; they assign responsibilities for each value to different institutional structures; or they gather and consult a taxonomy of specific cases where similar conflicts arose. We argue that each of these strategies can be rational in some institutional contexts, and that conclusion challenges the view that policy values must always be treated as commensurable for rational policy choices to be made. Government responds to value conflict in ways that are more varied and changing than existing views of public policy imply.     

Conflict in Trade Policy: The Role of the Congress and the Provinces in Negotiating and Implementing the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement

The provincial role in trade policy has until recently beenlimited, but the increasing impact of international trade negotiationson domestic policy issues has come into direct conflict withprovincial jurisdiction. At the same time, Congress has handedsome of its constitutional authority over trade matters to theexecutive branch through the granting of "fast track" negotiatingauthority. The paper argues that, as a result of these developments,the functional roles that Congress and the provinces playedin the negotiation of the FTA were not significantly differentin the two countries. However, in the implementation of thetrade agreement, roles again became clearly defined by constitutionaljurisdiction.     

Farm Conflict in France and the Europeanisation of Agricultural Policy

This article investigates farm conflict in France from 1958 to the present in relation to the dynamics of Europeanisation. The framework emphasises how institutions shape farm conflict by mediating market forces, structuring the political opportunities of contending groups and shaping their world views. The analysis investigates the relationship between institutional politics and contentious politics at three junctures of the development of the CAP: its formation (1958-69), consolidation (1970-87), and reform (1988 to present). The findings suggest that European institutions have played a significant role in the production and transformation of farm conflict in France.     

The Role of Arab American Advocacy Groups in Shaping American Foreign Policy

This paper aims to offer some insights into the ways in which Arab-Americans experience the United States and adjust to its political institutions. It stresses how such a community still finds it difficult to consolidate its efforts and exert pressure on the decision making process. But to gain national visibility and recognition, they need first to voice its concerns throughout mainstream advocacy groups. In this regard, the term “Arab lobby” is a misnomer as very often it is used as a shorthand word for the loose coalition of organizations that seek to improve Arabs’ conditions in the U.S. and to influence American foreign policy in the Middle East. Notwithstanding, this study is meant to highlight the difference between what some termed the informal Arab lobby, sponsored by rich oil countries, and the formal Arab American lobby, represented today by the Arab American Institute (AAI) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and headquartered in Washington D.C. However, while the different components of the pro-Arab lobby cannot represent “the Arabs” as a united political group, they have been able to share a common concern: Palestine. In effect, not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been a top priority and a principal focus of the Arab lobby as a whole, but it has also been viewed as a tool to measure its political efficacy. Last but not least, despite the very limited success achieved by the Arab lobby in its attempts to shape American foreign policy (compared to its pro-Israel counterpart), this study demonstrates that the members of the Arab and Jewish communities in the United States share common grounds on almost every issue central to Arab-Israel peace and U.S. policy in the Middle East, on top of them the two-state solution (Zogby International, 2007).     

Trade, Harmonization, and Domestic Autonomy in Environmental Policy

This article evaluates the environmental criticisms of free trade that have been such an important part of the critique of globalization. The first section briefly surveys the range of criticisms environmentalists have brought against the new economic order. The second section examines the available literature on the race to the bottom, one of the key concerns. The third section analyzes the World Trade Organization trade rules and how they have been interpreted by dispute resolution panels involving environmental issues. The fourth section turns to the specific rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement and examines several case studies of environmental issues in that region. The final section provides a summary evaluation of the environmental criticisms. The article argues that the environmental criticisms are exaggerated. Trade agreements leave far more room for domestic environmental measures than is frequently argued. The political globalization of the environmental movement has helped counter the threat to environmental policy created by the economic and trade aspects of globalization. Environmentalists do need to be careful about how they advance this critique of globalization, however, because their arguments risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.