The Globalization of Health and Safety Standards: Delegation of Regulatory Authority in the SPS Agreement of the 1994 Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization

Buthe examines why states delegated regulatory authority in the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures, an integral part of the founding treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Buthe argues that, to explain this case of international delegation, principal-agent theory must be complemented by an analysis of cost-benefit calculations of the relevant domestic interest groups. Given these domestic interests, governments decided to institutionalize international cooperation on SPS measures outside of the WTO because they believed that such delegation would minimize the political costs of the loss of policymaking autonomy. Buthe notes, however, that in retrospect it appears that the widespread positive association of international standards with multilateralism and international consensus led many countries to underestimate those autonomy losses. Material and ideational factors thus interacted to shape the definition of national interests and the outcome of international delegation

Competition Policy and Free Trade: Antitrust Provisions in PTAs

Trade agreements increasingly contain provisions concerning ‘behind-the-border’ barriers to trade, often beyond current World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments (Dur, Baccini and Elsig 2014). Today’s preferential trade agreements (PTAs) may include, for instance, rules regarding ‘technical’ barriers to trade that go beyond the WTO’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement), accelerating the replacement of differing national product safety standards with common international standards and thus reducing the trade-inhibiting effect of regulatory measures (Buthe and Mattli 2011; World Trade Organization 2012). Today’s PTAs may also go beyond WTO rules in prohibiting preferences for domestic producers in government procurement (Arrowsmith and Anderson 2011; Dawar and Evenett 2011), although here the effectiveness of the PTA provisions is in question (Rickard, Chapter 11 in this volume). PTA provisions concerning trade in services (Trebilcock and Howse 2005: 349ff.), restrictions on the use of trade remedies and anti-dumping (Bown 2011; Bown and Wu 2014) and provisions concerning the treatment of foreign investment (Buthe and Milner 2014; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2006) have similarly attracted substantial attention, as they often go beyond the rules in the multilateral trade regime. All of these measures involve governments committing to adopt – or to refrain from – particular policies. The stated objective of such commitments usually is to eliminate or at least reduce the trade-distorting effects of domestic policies (Bhagwati and Hudec 1996), though linking particular policy choices to trade might also serve other purposes. Linkage may, for instance, increase the bargaining space for ‘getting to yes’ on trade liberalisation (see Axelrod and Keohane 1986; Davis 2004) or reduce the bargaining space, arguably with the intent of retaining a higher level of protectionism (e.g. Salazar-Xirinachs 2000). PTA commitments on behind-the-border measures may also be adopted to ‘lock in’ policies by making it politically and economically more costly for the current government or its successors to depart from the policy choices specified in the trade agreement (Buthe and Milner 2008; Mansfield and Milner 2012; Moe 2005).

The Politics of Antitrust and Merger Review in the European Union: Institutional Change and Decisions from Messina to 2004. CES Working Paper, no. 142, 2007

Antitrust regulation and the related merger review are essential for making a market economy work. Mer-ger review is also among the most prominent powers of the European Commission in the Common Market of the EU. How did this supranational actor come to acquire such power? And what explains the variation in the Commission's decisions in some of the trans-atlantically most controversial merger review cases in recent years? In this paper, we develop a modified neofunctionalist theory as a historical institutionalist the-ory of institutional change that integrates elements of rational choice and social constructivism. We argue that it provides a superior explanation of (1) the institutional development of the European Commission’s competence over antitrust matters and merger review from the 1950s negotiations over the Treaty of Rome through the changes of 2004 and (2) the Commission’s decisions in some of the most prominent cases, where a high level of politicization makes a neofunctionalist explanation least likely