New champions of preferential trade? Two-level games in China’s and India’s shifting commercial strategies

Serrano, Omar Ramon; Eckhardt, Jappe (2023). New champions of preferential trade? Two-level games in China’s and India’s shifting commercial strategies Review of International Political Economy, 30(2), pp. 654-677. Routledge 10.1080/09692290.2022.2060278

Preview

Text New champions of preferential trade Two-level games in China s and India s shifting commercial strategies (1).pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (2MB) | Preview

Following decades of relative isolation, China and India have become the world’s largest new traders. In this paper, we focus on their Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). While the two economies initially followed similar paths, with a growing number of PTAs signed in the first decade of the 21st Century, since 2011 India has taken a U-turn and stopped completing them. China, on the other hand, has widened and deepened its trade agreements. We present a novel theoretical framework to analyze international economic negotiations by emerging economies and use it to study the puzzling divergence of the trade policies of China and India. By adapting the two-level game framework to emerging economies, we argue that there are key differences in the political economies of countries like China and India (compared to Western industrialized ones), which requires a more specific focus on the domestic side of the two-level game. We show that accounting for non-legislative domestic ratification processes and for iterative games and experiential learning by domestic actors are crucial in understanding the trade strategies of emerging economies. While much of the literature explains large emerging economies by looking at external systemic factors, we instead suggest that their domestic politics trumps international politics.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	Business School > Institute for Marketing & Global Management > Global Management Business School
Name:	Serrano, Omar Ramon0000-0002-7396-7891 and Eckhardt, Jappe
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JZ International relations
ISSN:	0969-2290
Publisher:	Routledge
Language:	English
Submitter:	Omar Ramon Serrano
Date Deposited:	13 Oct 2023 13:44
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2023 13:44
Publisher DOI:	10.1080/09692290.2022.2060278
Uncontrolled Keywords:	China; India; preferential trade agreements; emerging powers; two-level games
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.19505
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/19505