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Despite recent currency crises, most of the Asia-Pacific economies continue to be among the most attractive markets in the world and now appear to be recovering rapidly. An important element in understanding the dynamics of firm strategies in Asia is the nature of nonmarket strategies, which concern efforts to respond to and influence the political-economic-social environment. To examine such nonmarket strategies and how they fit with other firm tasks, this article first focuses on "positional analysis"—that is, how market forces, firm competencies, and the nonmarket environment influence the choice of trade, investment, or some mix, at the national, regional, or global level. It then considers the nature of "strategic analysis," consisting of a firm's choices of market arena, a transaction cost analysis of organization forms for market penetration, and a distributive politics analysis of nonmarket issues. These factors combine to influence the firm's integrated strategic choice. Implementation of this choice is based on "tactical analysis" that focuses on the market, organizational, and nonmarket tactics that firms must pursue to succeed with their chosen strategy.

As competition between newly industrializing and advanced industrialized countries has increased, trade protection has become a key issue. In textile and apparel trade, international regimes to regulate trade intervention have existed since the early 1960s. The 1981 renewal of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement poses two puzzles. First, why did countries choose to continue to manage conflict through an international regime rather than through some other arrangement? Second, why did the regime become weaker and more protectionist than in the past? An international structure approach suggests that regimes are wanted to prevent arrangements in larger systems from being undermined, to control the behavior of other countries, and to reduce information costs. Variation in regime strength can be explained by asymmetry in the distribution of capabilities in various systems. The nature of the regime is influenced by changes in international competition and by nesting. A domestic structure approach, on the other hand, focuses on the relationships between state and societal groups (the Commission and member states in the case of the EEC). The relative strength of groups affects national policies and the development and characteristics of regimes. A "processtracing" examination of international textile negotiations, emphasizing the response of decision makers to structural constraints and incentives, allows us to ascertain the relative influence of international and domestic structures on the negotiations and outcomes.