Organization and Trade

国际贸易的性质一直在变化。从历史上看，贸易主要由原材料和制成品的交换组成。但现在，“国际产量共享正逐渐成为常态。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，因此，在组合成最终产品之前，可以在不同的地点生产专门的部件和业务服务。与此同时，贸易壁垒的降低、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日益可行。事实上，国际生产共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，包括将各种部件和商业服务外包出去，建立外国子公司从事诸如装配和销售等活动，签订长期的、可能是排他性的许可协议，以及建立生产和销售的合资企业。在这个项目中，主要研究人员正在发展外国投资和贸易的理论模型，其中包括有关组织形式的决定。他们正在研究公司的选择，即是通过自我提供还是分包来获得组件或服务，以及他们对哪里可能是采购或制造组件的最佳地点的选择。随着项目的进展，作者还将考虑混合组织形式，例如“关系合同”（自我执行的长期协议）和合资企业（根据出现的偶然性，决策权可能属于一方或另一方）。在发展了新的贸易和外国投资模型之后，作者将用它们来解决重要的政策问题，例如国际生产共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）在诸如标准和规章等非传统领域进行更大的政府间合作。

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.