The Two-Level Battle: Domestic and Foreign Interests in GSP Review

• In Event: Trade Policy and Trade Networks

Abstract

Non-state actors in the politics of international trade are often relegated to the black box of the unitary state who engages in negotiation or advocacy on their behalf. However, non-state actors can and do enter the arena of trade politics in their own right. One realm in which these actors can directly confront both the state and other non-state firms is in the politics of market access under the WTO’s Generalized System of Preferences, which gives preferential tariff access to developing countries. While these preferences are unilaterally granted by developed economies, decisions about which products are eligible for preference are still subject to review and contestation. In the United States, actors can petition the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on an annual basis to add, remove or exempt product lines from the scheme. The actors involved in these reviews comprise both private and public actors, from both the United States and abroad. In this paper, we introduce a novel dataset of over 2,500 product-line reviews and 2,800 product line-year review participants, to investigate the determinants of petition success. Our findings, based on expectations that more politically important entities will be more likely to achieve their desired outcomes, provides new insights about how non-state actors can directly shape the rules of the global trading system.

Authors

• Jennifer L Tobin, Georgetown University

• Marc Busch, Georgetown University

• Samuel Brazys, University College Dublin