ABSTRACT
A central premise of this volume is that the trade agenda and, more generally, the international economic environment have become much more complex in several interrelated ways over recent years. Stephen Woolcock, in his opening chapter, traces these developments by examining the evolution of the multilateral trading system. First, there is the increasing erosion of the boundary between the domestic economy and the international. Early analyses of trade took the domestic economy as something of a ‘black box’ which simply produced goods for export; how an economy produced what it did was either ignored or, more typically, regarded as the unproblematic result of comparative advantage. Recent years have seen a steady erosion in the faith of comparative advantage to explain international trade. As Moon argues in his chapter, the export success of the Japanese economy served to remind observers that how a state organized its economy had trade implications. The interest among American economists during the 1980s in strategic trade policies flowed partly from this recognition.
