Sweetening the liberalization pill: flanking measures to free trade agreements

Noémie Laurens, Christian Winkler and Cédric Dupont

Review of International Political Economy, 2024, vol. 31, issue 6, 1919-1936

Abstract: Free trade agreement (FTA) negotiators increasingly face pressure from domestic interest groups, including environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil activists and labor unions. As a result of the growing scrutiny on the content of FTAs, we are now witnessing a proliferation of instruments accompanying FTAs, which we group under the label of flanking measures. In this article, we argue that flanking measures can serve two main non-exclusive purposes: Increasing aggregate social welfare by mitigating the negative spillovers of FTAs on society (the substantive dimension) and helping to build domestic coalitions in support of trade liberalization (the political dimension). Despite the relevance and growing empirical importance of the concept, flanking remains largely overlooked in the International Political Economy (IPE) literature. This essay seeks to fill this gap by discussing the scope, purposes and timing of flanking.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2024.2337193 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:rripxx:v:31:y:2024:i:6:p:1919-1936

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2024.2337193

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().