Anticipating United States foreign import trade practices: An examination of the distance between legislated policy and import trade behavior

This study provides an explanation for the difference between the prescriptions of US fair trade laws on the one hand, and US trade practices with respect to foreign imports on the other. It is intuitively appealing to assume that US trade laws predict to US trade practices, and this assumption is the basis for some scholars' use of trade laws as a proxy for levels of protection in the US. However, for the periods 1952 through 1968, and 1977 through 1994, US trade practices under fair trade laws deviated from the prescriptions of those laws almost 65% of the time.This project argues that a systematic understanding of presidential decisionmaking is important for anticipating US trade behaviors in cases petitioned under fair trade laws. There are at least two processes that lead to trade outcomes processes leading to the formation of policy, and implementation processes that lead to trade outcomes. The implementation process is the subject of this study, and it consists of presidential decisionmaking, given policy.It is argued that a key constraint on presidential decisionmaking in the area of trade is the way in which the president views the relationship between the domestic economy and the international economy. It is posited that presidents who see the national and international economies as interdependent are internationally oriented. Presidents are posited to be nationally oriented when the national economy is viewed as superior to or responsible for leading the international economy. Two hypotheses are tested: (1) An internationally oriented president will choose free or strategic trade practices in fair trade cases and (2) A nationally oriented president will choose fair or protected trade practices in fair trade cases.Two case studies from the footwear industry are chosen to test the hypotheses. There is support for the importance of the variable, but it is clear that the addition of variables that measure both congressional pressures on the president and advice from his inner circle would improve the model. An important contribution of this study is that the dependent variable, policy implementation, has been overlooked by the dominant literature on US import trade.