Contesting an international trade agreement

Matthew Cole, James Lake and Benjamin Zissimos

No 2020-22, Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP

Abstract: We develop a new theoretical political economy framework called a `parallel contest' that emphasizes the political fight over trade agreement (TA) ratification within countries. TA ratiification is inherently uncertain in each country because anti- and pro-trade interests contest each other to in fluence their own government's ratification decision. As in the terms-of-trade theory of TAs, the TA removes terms-of-trade externalities created by unilateral tarifs. But, a TA also creates new terms-of-trade and local-price externalities in our framework due to endogenous ratification uncertainty combined with the requirement that each country ratifies the TA for it to go ahead. Thus, reciprocal TA liberalization fails to eliminate all terms-of-trade externalities.

Keywords: Contest; international agreement; lobbying; tarifs; trade agreement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-pol
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https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/gep/documents/papers/2020/2020-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Contesting an international trade agreement (2021)
Working Paper: Contesting an International Trade Agreement (2018)
Working Paper: Contesting an international trade agreement (2018)
Working Paper: Contesting an International Trade Agreement (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notgep:2020-22

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