Existing formal models of the relationship between trade policy and regulatory policy suggest the potential for a regulatory race to the bottom. WTO rules and disputes, however, center on complaints about excessively stringent regulations. This paper bridges the gap between the existing formal...

The Constitution of 1787 was designed to give Congress powers over trade policy that it lacked under the Articles of Confederation. The Washington administration was split over whether to use these powers to raise revenue or to retaliate against Britain's discriminatory trade policies. Obsessed...

This paper assesses the place of active trade policy in U.S. industrial change.The growing role of imperfectly competitive multinational corporations provides new arguments for more active U.S. trade policy, as does an increased social consensus that governments should insure what markets do...

Empirical scholarship on the standards-trade relationship has been held up due to methodological challenges: measurement, varied effects, and endogeneity. Considering the trade-effects of one particular standard (ISO 9000), we surmount methodological challenges by measuring standardization via...

While many political scientists and diplomatic historians see the Bush presidency as a distinctive epoch in American foreign policy, we argue that there was no Bush Doctrine in foreign economic policy. The Bush administration sought to advance a free trade agenda but could not avoid the use of...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

The decade from 1985 to 1995 was an unprecedented period of declining barriers to global trade. The reform wave was especially pronounced in developing countries where overvalued currencies were eliminated, quantitative import restrictions dismantled, and import tariffs reduced. What accounts...

In this paper, I examine the argument that free trade may be harmful to less developed countries, because such international competition inhibits the formation of a local entrepreneurial class.I view the entrepreneur as the manager of the industrial enterprise, as well as the agent who bears the...

In their striving toward development, a number of less developed countries have espoused bilateral trade as yet another policy instrument allowing them to increase their acquisition of foreign resources. This has been particularly true of the trade of India, Pakistan, and Egypt, on which some...