Contesting an international trade agreement

Matthew Cole, James Lake and Benjamin Zissimos

No 1805, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

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 ratification is inherently uncertain in each country, where anti- and pro-trade interest groups contest each other to influence their own governments' ratification decision. Unlike prior literature, the protection embodied in negotiated TA tariffs reflects a balance between the liberalizing force of lobbying and inherently protectionist government preferences. Moreover, new international political externalities emerge that are not internalized by governments that just internalize terms of trade externalities.

Keywords: Trade Agreement; ratification; tariff; contest; lobbying; contribution; externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 F02 F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth, nep-int and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ftp1.economics.smu.edu/WorkingPapers/2018/LAKE/LAKE-2018-05.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Contesting an international trade agreement (2021)
Working Paper: Contesting an international trade agreement (2020)
Working Paper: Contesting an International Trade Agreement (2018)
Working Paper: Contesting an International Trade Agreement (2017)
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:smu:ecowpa:1805

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, P.O. Box 750496, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0496.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ömer Özak ().