This chapter presents qualitative case studies of the dramatically different political dynamics of TPP and TTIP negotiations. Why was lobbying so much more contentious over TPP while lobbying over TTIP was muted and almost entirely in favor of the agreement? The chapter traces the development of industry and labor union positions on each agreement, showing how the effects of endowments-based, inter-industry trade on the basis of comparative advantage (much more prevalent with TPP partners) serves to unify industries and unions around their particular position, facilitating strong collective action. With TTIP, the chapter shows how internationally engaged firms were highly motivated to lobby in favor of increased market access and the removal of regulatory barriers, while domestic-oriented firms either sat out of the political process entirely or formed cross-sectoral ad hoc coalitions. These cases elucidate how and why actors came to these decisions.

Chapter 3 develops a theory of the domestic politics of intra-industry trade. It argues that changes in the nature of trade away from endowments-based trade to two-way trade within industries change the structure of preferences over trade policy and the way that actors mobilize politically in order to influence trade policy. This, in turn, affects trade policy outcomes and the ease with which trade agreements are concluded. First, I argue that the distributional effects of intra-industry trade drive a wedge through industry preferences over trade policy. As intra-industry trade increases, globalized firms support openness, and smaller, domestic-oriented firms within the same industry support protection. Second, these heterogeneous firm preferences change the ability of industries to overcome collective action problems and organize politically to influence trade policy. I argue that industry associations are hamstrung in their ability to lobby while individual firms have a greater incentive to lobby alone for their preferred policies. Third, exporters will overwhelm domestic-oriented firms in their ability to lobby, and as a result, tariffs will be lower in industries with higher intra-industry trade, though this may not be the case with non-tariff barriers to trade.

This chapter assesses the effects of intra-industry trade on lobbying in the EU. It includes the results of analysis of an original dataset of EU-based lobbying over several trade agreements. First, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of trade policy in the EU, and then surveys the literature on the politics of trade in Europe, with a focus on the state of our knowledge about the character of political coalitions and the involvement of industry associations and individual firms in the trade policymaking process. Second, the chapter discusses the role of intra-industry trade in the EU and presents an argument about the way that IIT has eroded the ability of European industry associations to lobby jointly over trade policy. Third, the chapter introduces the dataset used to assess the argument and discusses the quantitative analysis and results. The results support the theory developed in this book and demonstrate that IIT affects societal coalitions across diverse institutional contexts.

This chapter assesses the book's theory about the effects of intra-industry trade on lobbying in the US case. First, the chapter examines the changing dynamics of trade politics in the United States during the postwar period, and it demonstrates the ways that these dynamics diverge from what is predicted by the classic trade models. Second, the chapter presents testable hypotheses to assess the influence of intra-industry trade on the structure of trade politics coalitions. In the remaining sections, I test my hypotheses and discuss my results and their implications for the politics of international trade. Using firm-level data on trade policy lobbying expenditures for 459 US manufacturing industries, I show that industry associations become less active in their lobbying efforts, relative to individual firms, as intra-industry trade increases. Furthermore, I find that this effect is stronger in import-competing sectors than in strong exporting sectors. This suggests that in import-competing sectors, exporting firms break away from protectionist industry associations to lobby alone for liberalization.

The book opens with some compelling examples of puzzling episodes in recent trade policy negotiations. I question why Americans were largely unaware of TTIP, while the TPP became a lightning rod for controversy and went down in flames on day one of the Trump presidency. I also discuss the dramatic rise in firm-level lobbying over these and other trade agreements, despite the IPE literature’s longstanding assumption that firms primarily engage in trade politics collectively via industry associations or class-based coalitions. Then I briefly introduce my theoretical story, which makes sense of these and other puzzles. I discuss the state of our understanding of trade politics in developed democracies before presenting the plan of the book to follow.

This chapter begins by applying the theory of the firm to the context of a medical practice. The concepts of profit maximization, inputs to production, and outputs from production are all applied to this example. Then the chapter moves on to discuss sources of efficiency in production and specific applications to medical care production. The chapter then develops the basics of supply curves, and how they are interpreted and used, and then brings supply together with demand to describe the basics of equilibrium in an efficient market. The last part of the chapter discusses threats to efficiency in markets, giving a brief overview of the largest sources of difficulty in applying efficient markets to the healthcare context. This sets up the rest of the book: the healthcare sector is filled with problems that make efficient markets unlikely, meaning that understanding the underlying economics is vital.

Focusing on firm-level behavior in the US pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, Chapter 4 provides evidence that companies do indeed seek stricter standards on their own, out-of-patent products in order to boost sales of newer, patented substitutes, even providing negative information about their own products in pursuit of this goal. In order to show this, the chapter leverages petitions submitted by pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies to the US FDA and EPA, respectively, requesting that the agencies place stricter standards or all out bans on products that these companies themselves developed. In the case of the pharmaceutical petitions, the chapter provides evidence that all but one of the requests for a product ban has targeted a drug that is about to lose or has already lost patent protection and for which the company had a more recently patented substitute. This suggests that such requests are not publicly minded attempts to ensure dangerous products remain off the market but, instead, are strategic gambits to boost profits of exclusively produced alternatives. In addition, the chapter provides a statistical analysis of petitions submitted by agrochemical companies and farm groups to show that, whereas farmers are no more likely to seek stricter standards on out-of-patent pesticides, agrochemical companies systematically request stricter standards on these products while requesting more lenient standards on products still enjoying patent protection.

The Verein der am Caffeehandel betheiligten Firmen, an association that grew to include all of Hamburg-based coffee traders, was established in May 1886. By 1939, the association was completely subjugated to the will of the Nazi regime, and it collapsed within the first few weeks of World War II. In the postwar period, the coffee traders of Hamburg were largely regulated by the Allied occupying forces, and this often led to undesirable circumstances, including internal competition. This chapter looks at the evolution of Hamburg coffee traders and how they functioned in the global market from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. It considers the history of the Hamburg coffee traders, from the turbulent life span of the association to the challenging relationship between the Hamburg coffee traders and the Allied forces in West Germany and the global coffee moguls of the 1980s. The chapter analyzes the factors that contributed to the association’s downfall, including shifting worldviews, international market upheavals, and strong state intervention. Primary sources consulted include meeting minutes, news articles, legal documents, annual reports, and commission transactions.

Global law firms and their prominent postion in the investment arbitration market is under-appreciated; yet there is a sound hypothesis that law firms seek to establish and maintain their social capital in the arbitration field in a similar manner as individuals such as arbitrators and counsel, as was captured in Dezalay and Garth’s pioneering study. Building on the social networks of arbitrators, this study focuses on the relationships between the most influential arbitrators and the most influential law firms in the system and how these relationships might create real or perceived conflicts of interest issues for the ISDS system. Using mixed methods – integrated network, statistical and doctrinal analyses – the chapter documents how the law firms have gained a central position in the ISDS network by establishing strong relationships to leading arbitrators. The author finds that the top law firms have positioned themselves as ‘gatekeepers’ to the ISDS system, in particular in terms of distribution of cases among potential arbitrators and the acceptance of new arbitrators, and discusses possible impacts on the perceived independence and legitimacy of the ISDS system.