Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The multilateral trade system is concerned primarily with economic liberalization, but the link between trade and non trade values, as human rights and environment protection, has been increasingly object of concern to scholars and practitioners alike. GATT Article XX is widely referred to as expression of this link, but there currently are many other links between trade and non trade values within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Most of the literature on the issue, though, has normative approaches, concerning either values that should be included in/excluded from WTO’s agenda or how conflicts related to trade and non trade values should be decided by the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). It is noticeable that “trade and…” conflicts have reached the WTO’s agenda primarily through the dispute settlement system. “Trade and…” disputes, though, amount to only around 10% of the disputes initiated by members in the DSB thus far (and the number of this kind of dispute has been decreasing since 2003), and Members have been able to settle their disputes by negotiation in most cases. Against, this backdrop, this paper aims at: (1) showing that, notwithstanding the many possible conflicts and links envisaged by scholars, only a few issues related to trade and non trade conflicts have reached the WTO decision making; (2) describing how members have had recourse to the WTO and, in a few cases, other regimes/IGOs to pursue their interests with regard to those issues; and (3) outlining the effects of this behavior to relationship between trade and non trade values in the WTO in general.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: International political economists, trade specialists and management scholars have long debated how language affects bilateral trade. But these debates have been hindered by non-robust datasets; trade economists often simply ask whether the trading partners speak the same language or not, and code their datasets using this dichotomy. We employ a very different, more robust idea. By examining the similarity between languages, and accepting that many nation-states’ populations are mulitilingual, our model includes the cultural cleavages between bilateral trading partners which result from different language patterns.

Patterns of international trade have a profound effect on economic development and the growing disparity between nation-states. By introducing a new, more accurate, language dataset developed by prominent scholars from lexico-statistics, we expand our understanding of trade. We employ this dataset in a gravity equation model. Results confirm that bilateral trade increases when nation-states’ populations can directly communicate. This result is robust whether the language spoken is the official language, or simply a language spoken by a significant part of the populations of two trading partners.

It is our view that, while linguistic differences are understood to lead to cleavage and conflict by international studies scholars, a robust dataset has not been employed to systematically explain this effect. We introduce such a dataset which may be employed in other analyses such as diplomatic negotiation and dyadic conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: While the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) have set uniform conditions under which member states are allowed to adopt protection measures, such as safeguard and anti-dumping measures, the states� use
of these provisions significantly differs among OECD countries. In particular, Japan�s
application of these measures deviates substantially from other advanced economies in
three respects: (1) the infrequency with which it uses GATT/WTO protectionist provisions;
(2) regional biases in the targets of these measures; and (3) its increasing recourse to
safeguard provisions instead of anti-dumping measures after 1995. In contrast to
dominant claims that a government resorts to international rules for the purpose of
enhancing its credibility or to shift blame in order to appease domestic interest groups, I
argue that the pattern of Japan�s choice of one policy instrument over another can be
explained by different distributional implications of the three policy instruments.
This paper introduces a new data set on Japan�s trade policy choices between 1980
and 2001. The data set covers 103 commodity cases that (1) suffered from a rise of imports
and (2) were granted one of three protectionist instruments by the Japanese
government�domestic subsidies, voluntary export restraints and the GATT/WTO legal
protectionist measures. The data set is analyzed using a conditional logit framework. Conditional logit allows for a government�s utility to vary not only across the commodity cases and time periods, but also across the three policy alternatives. The results of the conditional logit estimation support the distributional hypothesis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Existing theories of a country's exposure to trade and political coalitions explicitly or implicitly assume unilateral liberalization process (Magee 1978; Rogowski 1988; Hiscox 2003). Majority of developing countries, however, have liberalized their trade through multilateral and bilateral negotiations. This paper theorizes how bilateral and multilateral liberalizations mobilize domestic political coalitions differently than unilateral liberalization, focusing on politicians' ex ante incentives to log-roll (for protectionist policy) versus their ex post incentives to blame-shift (when lobbying for protectionist policy fails). The paper introduces an originally constructed dataset on interest group testimony on trade policy before the Diet committees in Japan from 1950 to 2002. The dataset captures what commodity was discussed in which year, whether a given commodity was liberalized through unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral arenas, whether witnesses testified as a class, sector, or regionally-organized interest groups, coherence of their trade policy positions, and their frequency of testimony. The analysis suggests that broader, class-based cleavages tend to emerge in bilateral liberalization, while narrow, regional cleavages are likely to emerge in multilateral liberalization. These results call for locating the study of trade policy cleavages in global and bilateral institutional contexts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: I examine process and deliberation in global trade and environment fora dealing with overlapping trade-environment issues, particularly the relevance of communicative (vs. strategic) action to outcomes. Communicative action is characterized by transparency, egalitarian process, and argumentation based on considerations of common good, whereas strategic action tends toward opaqueness, hierarchical domination, and the pursuit of egoistic interests. In a case study of rule-making on the trade of genetically modified organisms, an overlapping issue tabled in trade and environment regimes (culminating in the 1999 World Trade Organization and the 2000 Biosafety Protocol meetings), I demonstrate how a more inclusive and egalitarian forum worked in favor of the diffusion of green norms and rules. This is contrary to expectations of the rich-green model of trade environment politics which posits developed countries to be the primary advocates and beneficiaries of green-friendly rule-making, and which subsequently implies that fora in which these states are likely to be the most environment-friendly. To examine the generalizability of this pattern I interviewed officers of global environmental nongovernmental organizations as to: major trade-environment issues; the relative importance of these issues; and their organizations' degree of agreement with the US, G77, and EU positions on each issue. I found that with the exception of the case of overlapping issues in the WTO, the respondents tended to see their organizations as having the greatest degree of agreement with the G77. I conclude that institutions can either intensify or mitigate the extent to which asymmetry and egoism prevail as factors in international rule-making, and that the explanatory efficacy of the rich-green hypothesis must be considered limited and conditional, most applicable in cases where power asymmetries and egoistic behavior are built into institutional process and deliberation. The expectation that broader inclusivity, and greater empowerment of developed states will inhibit environment-friendly rule-making is unwarranted. Greater inclusion, and more public and egalitarian process, may in fact advance the cause of environment-friendly rule-making on trade-environment issues.