ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that public choice has been applied specifically to international political economy and that there is a large and rapidly growing literature on the subject. Public goods theory and politico-economic modeling will be briefly mentioned here in order to illuminate the public choice approach to international political economy. The "constitutional" approach has been applied to various problems in international political economy, among them environmental and fisheries pacts, international public health accords, cooperation about forecasting the weather, the use of outer space, and the international judicial system. Interesting contributions have been made within public choice to the study of the benefits and costs of joining international organizations, their decision rules, and their internal bureaucracy, to the study of bargaining in an international setting. The formal rules defining how decisions are to be made within an international organization can have an important effect on expected costs of providing a public good from the point of view of an individual country.
