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Global commerce is rapidly organizing around regional trading blocs in North America, Western Europe, Pacific Asia, and elsewhere--with potentially dangerous consequences for the world trading system. Professor Kerry Chase examines how domestic politics has driven the emergence of these trading blocs, arguing that businesses today are more favorably inclined to global trade liberalization than in the past because recent regional trading arrangements have created opportunities to restructure manufacturing more efficiently. Trading Blocsis the first book to systematically demonstrate the theoretical significance of economies of scale in domestic pressure for trading blocs, and thereby build on a growing research agenda in areas of political economy and domestic politics."Chase has written a superb book that provides us with an innovative and compelling explanation for the development of trading blocs."--Vinod Aggarwal, Director, Berkeley APEC Study Center, University of California, BerkeleyKerry A. Chaseis Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University

Intro -- Contents -- List of Tables -- List of Figures -- Acronyms -- Chapter 1 Introduction: A World of Trading Blocs -- Chapter 2: The Argument: Domestic Groups and Regional Arrangements -- Chapter 3: Interwar Trading Blocs: Japan, Britain, and Germany, 1919-39 -- Chapter 4: The United States and Multilateral N105Trade Liberalization, 1922-67 -- Chapter 5: The EU: Fortress or Beachhead? -- Chapter 6: NAFTA: The Politics in the United States -- Chapter 7: Reluctant Regionalism: Japan and Asia -- Chapter 8: Multinationals and the New Regionalism -- Appendix -- References -- Index.

"Trade and Culture" published on by Oxford University Press.

Theories of trade and domestic politics have been applied extensively to manufacturing and agriculture; the political economy of trade in services, however, remains poorly understood. This article examines how the "offshoring" of services segments labor markets and places low-skilled and high-skilled labor at odds on trade issues. Drawing from a case where trade has been politically contentious of late—motion picture services in the United States—the article finds that offshoring can aggravate wage inequality, creating incentives for low-skilled workers to demand policy remedies. Consistent with this expectation, an ordered probit analysis of labor-group lobbying reveals that low-skilled occupations in motion picture services were most likely to support countervailing duties and Section 301 action against productions filmed abroad. The findings suggest that when services are tradable, labor-market cleavages are not purely factoral or sectoral, but occupational. This new politics of trade in services has important implications for trade policy in the United States and multilateral rulemaking in the World Trade Organization.

The design of rules of origin in free trade agreements (FTAs) arouses spirited lobbying campaigns that mostly escape public attention. This article argues that the domestic groups generally most favorable to FTAs differ in their preferences over rules of origin: industries with large returns to scale favor strict rules of origin to gain scale economies in an FTA, while industries with multinational supply chains prefer lenient rules of origin to accommodate offshore procurement. An econometric analysis of rules of origin in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) finds tougher rules of origin the higher the external trade protection and the larger the returns to scale, and more permissive rules of origin the greater the involvement in foreign sourcing. The results suggest that rules of origin may be critical to building domestic coalitions for FTAs. Industry preferences toward rules of origin therefore have important implications for the politics of FTA ratification.

Trade-related investment measures (TRIMs) have been a key issue in regional and multilateral trade negotiations, but they have received little attention in theoretical work to date. This article analyzes the political economy of TRIMs to illuminate why regional arrangements have been a popular framework for eliminating them. The main argument is that multinational firms often demand safeguards when TRIMs are being liberalized, particularly if they have large sunk costs due to asset specificity. In general, regional arrangements are better equipped than multilateral rules to incorporate the safeguards these firms demand: regionalism requires governments to make binding commitments, and it creates opportunities to discriminate against outsiders. A case study of lobbying by U.S. companies with FDI in Canada from the early twentieth century to the negotiation of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement illustrates these points. The article concludes that regional arrangements are likely to remain more active, and more successful, than multilateral discussions in managing the commitment problems inherent in liberalizing TRIMs.