Multilateral Trade Bargaining: Theory and Evidence from the GATT Bargaining Records

建议编号：SE-1326940标题：多边贸易谈判：来自关贸总协定谈判记录的理论和证据国家科学基金会项目：主要调查员：施泰格，罗伯特·W。随着世贸组织长达十年的多边贸易谈判多哈回合的悬而未决，理解贸易谈判的性质对世界贸易体系来说从未像现在这样重要。与此同时，从任何真实的讨价还价环境中获得大规模现场数据都是极不寻常的，这为更广泛地阐明讨价还价实践的研究创造了一个重要机会。出于这两个原因，世贸组织最近公布了关贸总协定前四轮多边谈判的关税谈判记录，为经济学家提供了一个重要的研究机会。这一研究项目将把关贸总协定的谈判记录转换为研究人员可以获取的形式，并开始结合关贸总协定/世贸组织的制度特征使用这些数据的进程，以开发和测试谈判理论，并评估可能的改进措施。关贸总协定/世贸组织的关税谈判表现出几个显著的特点。首先，这些谈判是一种易货贸易，各国政府接受关于本国进口关税的承诺，以换取其主要贸易伙伴的互惠关税承诺。第二，对于每一轮谈判，都采用了一种特定的谈判协议，对事件的时间安排、预期的互动类型和参与者之间的信息交换都有明确的规则。最后，尽管关贸总协定是一个多边机构，但在很大程度上，关贸总协定/世贸组织采取了双边方式进行多边谈判，根据这种方式，在一段时间内，各国之间在自愿的基础上进行互惠谈判(关于关税)，这些双边谈判的结果随后通过非歧视要求遵守最惠国原则，被“多边”化为关贸总协定/世贸组织的正式成员。关贸总协定的前四轮谈判跨越1947-1956年，涉及800多对谈判国，达成了超过6.5万项商定的关税削减。在每一轮谈判中，关税谈判都采取成对国家同时就多个税目进行双边谈判的形式，所有这些都受制于与最惠国原则有关的潜在外部性。对于每个双边国家组合，谈判记录包括关税请求、要约和反要约的顺序，以及最终商定的关税承诺(或无法达成协议的声明)。当时的著作强调了关贸总协定早期回合中的贸易谈判挑战，这些挑战在现代具有明显的对应性：解决优惠关税的存在(如英国的英联邦贸易惯例所体现的)，处理谈判国家之间关税水平的不对称(源于特定回合中新加入谈判桌的国家)，处理与最惠国待遇相关的潜在谈判外部性(主要供应商规则和关税减让等技术在谈判伙伴之间分割)，以及面临重大谈判失败的可能性(例如，英美双边在托基回合中的失败)。在将这些谈判记录转换为可供研究的形式后，该项目将利用这些数据开始评估各种问题，从优惠贸易安排是否为多边贸易自由化制造绊脚石或基石，关税不对称是否给谈判带来困难，各国如何处理潜在的谈判外部性，以及如何解释谈判失败。该项目还将展示，在某些条件下，如何利用谈判数据恢复参与国政府的基本政治偏好，并构建完整的信息效率前沿，据此可以判断实际关贸总协定回合的结果，并评估反事实谈判协议的执行情况。

AbstractProposal No: SES - 1326940 Title: Multilateral Trade Bargaining: Theory and Evidence from the GATT Bargaining RecordsNSF Program: ECONOMICSPrincipal Investigator: Staiger, Robert W.With the WTO's decade-long Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations on the ropes, understanding the nature of trade bargaining has never been more important for the world trading system. At the same time, the availability of large-scale field data from any real-world bargaining setting is highly unusual, and it creates an important opportunity for research that illuminates the practice of bargaining more generally. For both of these reasons, the WTO's recent release of tariff bargaining records for the first four GATT multilateral negotiating rounds presents a major research opportunity for economists. This research project will transform the GATT bargaining records into a form that is accessible for researchers, and begin the process of using the data in combination with institutional features of the GATT/WTO to develop and test theories of bargaining and evaluate alternative bargaining protocols for possible improvements.GATT/WTO tariff negotiations display several notable features. First, these negotiations are a form of barter, whereby governments accept commitments on their own import tariffs in exchange for the reciprocal tariff commitments of their principal trading partners. Second, for each round a specific bargaining protocol is adopted, with explicit rules for the timing of events, the kinds of interactions expected and the exchange of information among participants. And finally, though it is a multilateral institution, for the most part the GATT/WTO has adopted a bilateral approach to multilateral bargaining according to which reciprocal negotiations (over tariffs) occur on a voluntary basis through time between pairs of countries, with the results of these bilateral negotiations then "multilateralized" to the full GATT/WTO membership by a non-discrimination requirement that tariffs abide by the most-favored nation (MFN) principle.The first four GATT rounds spanned the years 1947-1956, involved more than 800 pairs of bargaining countries and resulted in over 65,000 agreed tariff cuts. In each of these rounds, the tariff negotiations took the form of simultaneous bilateral bargaining between pairs of countries over multiple tariff lines, all subject to the potential externality associated with the MFN principle. For each bilateral country pair, the bargaining records include the sequence of tariff requests, offers and counter-offers, and the eventual tariff commitments that were agreed (or a statement that agreement could not be reached). The writings of the time emphasize trade bargaining challenges in the early GATT rounds that have obvious counterparts in modern times: addressing the existence of preferential tariffs (as embodied in the commonwealth trade practices of the United Kingdom), dealing with asymmetries in the tariff levels across negotiating countries (stemming from newcomers to the bargaining table in a given round), approaching the potential bargaining externalities associated with MFN (with techniques such as the principal supplier rule and tariff concessions split across bargaining partners), and confronting the possibility of major bargaining failures (as for example the failure of the UK-U.S. bilateral in the Torquay Round). After converting these bargaining records into research-ready form, this project will use the data to begin to evaluate questions ranging from whether preferential trading arrangements create stumbling blocks or building blocks for multilateral trade liberalization, to whether tariff asymmetries pose difficulties for negotiations, to how countries deal with potential bargaining externalities, to what explains bargaining failure. The project will also show how, under certain conditions, the bargaining data can be used to recover the underlying political preferences of the participating governments and construct the complete-information efficiency frontier, against which the outcome of actual GATT rounds can be judged and the performance of counter-factual bargaining protocols can be assessed.