Organization and Trade

国际贸易的性质一直在发生变化。从历史上看，贸易主要是原材料和制成品的交换。但现在，“国际生产共享正在成为常态”。技术的进步使得将生产过程划分为一系列更精细的活动成为可能，这样专门的部件和商业服务就可以在不同的地点生产，然后再组合成最终产品。与此同时，贸易壁垒的减少、通信和运输成本的下降以及许多国家法律条件的改善使经济活动的国际化变得越来越可行。的确，国际生产分享的过程很可能是现代“全球化”的本质特征。全球化包括各种组织安排，包括在保持距离的关系中外包各种部件和商业服务，设立外国子公司从事组装和销售等活动，签订长期和可能的独家许可协议，以及建立生产和销售合资企业。在这个项目中，主要研究人员正在开发外国投资和贸易的理论模型，其中包括关于组织形式的决策。他们正在研究公司对是通过自我供应还是转包获得零部件或服务的选择，以及他们对在哪里采购或制造零部件的最佳地点的选择。随着项目的进展，作者还将考虑混合的组织形式，如“关系合同”(自我执行长期协议)和合资企业(根据出现的意外情况，决策权可能掌握在一方或另一方手中)。在开发了新的贸易和外国投资模式后，作者将利用这些模式来解决重要的政策问题，例如国际生产分享是否导致了美国和欧洲收入分配的不利趋势，以及全球化是否阻碍了政府监管行业的能力。此外，他们将调查经济活动的国际化是否需要在世贸组织(或其他地方)在标准和监管等非传统领域加强政府间合作。

The nature of international trade has been changing. Historically, trade has consisted largely of an exchange of raw materials and finished goods. But now, "international production sharing is becoming more the norm. Improvements in technology have made possible the division of the production process into an ever finer set of activities, so that specialized components and business services can be produced in various locations before being combined into a final product. Meanwhile, falling trade barriers, declining communication and transportation costs, and improvements in the legal conditions in many countries have made the internationalization of economic activity increasingly viable. Indeed, the process of international production sharing may well be the essential feature of modern "globalization." Globalization encompasses a variety of organizational arrangements, including the outsourcing of various components and business services in arms-length relations, the establishment of foreign subsidiaries to undertake activities such as assembly and marketing, the entry into long-term and possibly exclusive licensing agreements, and the establishment of joint ventures for production and marketing. In this project, the principal investigators are developing theoretical models of foreign investment and trade that incorporate decisions about organizational form. They are studying firms' choices about whether to obtain a component or service by self-provision or subcontracting together with their choices about where might be the best place to source or manufacture components. As the project progresses, the authors also will consider hybrid organizational forms, such as "relational contracts" (self-enforcing long-term agreements) and joint ventures (where decision-making authority may reside with one party or the other depending on the contingencies that arise). After developing their new models of trade and foreign investment, the authors will use them to address important policy issues, such as whether international production sharing has contributed to the adverse trends in income distribution in the United States and Europe and whether globalization hinders the ability of governments to regulate industry. Further, they will investigate whether the internationalization of economic activity necessitates greater intergovernmental cooperation in the WTO (or elsewhere) in non-traditional areas such as standards and regulation.