Many developing countries flocked to free trade since the early 1980s. Concurrent with this rush to adopt an open trade regime, there has been a global movement toward democracy. We argue that these two trends are related by showing how democratization of the political system reduces the ability of governments to use trade barriers as a strategy for building political support. We capture the de...

We develop a political economy model of trade agreements that incorporates contracting costs and uncertainty. The model delivers simple expressions for policy bindings with parameters relating to trade shocks and to political demand shocks. We identified conditions under which the trade volume is positively associated with the payoff of restricting production subsidy/consumption tax. Our model ...

Much of the literature on the design of trade policy institutions takes the political pressure that governments face as exogenous. This paper integrates exogenous and endogenous political pressure into a single model, showing that the presence of endogenous political pressure overturns important results and provides insight into observed features of trade agreements as well as rules of organiza...

Social Complexity, Learning and International Political Economy, With Illustrations from the Political Economy of Trade Policy Complexity is an essential element of the political economic environment. This fact implies that ignorance and learning will affect the dynamics of that environment. This paper surveys recent work from decision theory, game theory, and economics that seeks to formalize ...

A “Council for Government Electronic Data Processing” was established in 1961. This was the start of development of a common policy for computers and data within the public administration. In 1969-70, computers got on the agenda of political parties and the trade unions. In the course of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties the government, the political parties, and the trade unions ...