Is Trade Policy for Sale? Congressional Voting on Recent Trade Bills

Robert Baldwin and Christopher S. Magee

No 6376, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines voting by members of Congress on three trade bills introduced in 1993 and 1994: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the agreements concluded in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations (GATT), and most-favored nation status for China. We first review recnet political economy models of trade policy and then presenting a brief legislative history of the three bills, use these models to formulate an empirical specification of political behavior. In our empirical tests, we find evidence that campaign contributions given be political action committees influenced legislators' votes on both the NAFTA and GATT bills. Contributions from labor groups were associated with votes against freer trade, while contributions from business groups were associated with votes in favor of freer trade. We also find that the broad policy views of the legislators, industry employment in each member's state or congressional district, and general economic conditions in the district or state affected voting on the trade bills.

JEL-codes: D72 F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-01
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published as Baldwin, Robert E. and Christopher S. Magee. "Is Trade Policy For Sale? Congressional Voting On Recent Trade Bills," Public Choice, 2000, v105(1/2,Oct), 79-101.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6376.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is Trade Policy for Sale? Congressional Voting on Recent Trade Bills (2000)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6376

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6376

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().