The Political Economy of International Trade Relations

这个项目研究影响国际贸易和全球环境的政策的形成。虽然贸易文献对确定总体福利最大化的政策投入了大量精力，但在理解一个现实的政治过程中会出现什么政策的努力相对较少，在这个政治过程中，政策制定者必须对特殊利益集团和普通选民的要求做出回应。已经建立了一种政治经济学模型，在这种模型中，民选官员对政治激励做出反应。该模型将被扩展和应用于考虑保护的均衡结构、政府对贸易政策工具的选择、贸易和环境政策(以及支持这两种干预的利益集团之间)之间的相互作用，以及不同国家政府在合作和非合作环境下的相互作用。这项研究的最终目的是评估世界贸易体系的替代制度“游戏规则”。希望将确定一些规则，以促进自由贸易制度，使其从贸易中获得最大的互惠利益，并在国际环境问题上进行有效合作。为了实现这一点，首先必须发展和完善理论框架，以便能够在不同可能的制度约束下预测新出现的政策结果。

This project studies the formation of policies that affect international trade and the global environment. While the trade literature has devoted much attention to identifying policies that maximize aggregate welfare, relatively little effort has been made to understand what policies will emerge from a realistic political process in which policy makers must respond to the demands of both special interests and the general electorate. A political economy model has been developed in which elected officials respond to political incentives. This model will be extended and applied to consider such problems as the equilibrium structure of protection, the government's choice of trade policy instrument, the interaction between trade and environmental policies (and between the interest groups that support these two types of interventions), and the interaction between governments of different countries in both cooperative and noncooperative settings. The ultimate aim of the research is to evaluate alternative institutional "rules of the game" for the world trading system. It is hoped that rules will be identified that will facilitate a liberal trading regime with greatest mutual benefits from trade and with efficient cooperation on international environmental matters. In order to accomplish this, the theoretical framework must first be developed and refined so that emerging policy outcomes can be predicted under different possible institutional constraints.