A Political-Economic Analysis of Free-Trade Agreements
证明双边自由贸易协定可能削弱对进一步多边贸易自由化的政治支持，尤其当协定给关键代理人带来过大收益时，会阻碍多边协议达成。
This paper demonstrates that bilateral free-trade agreements can undermine political support for further multilateral trade liberalization. If a bilateral trade agreement offers disproportionately large gains to key agents in a country, then their reservation utility is raised above the multilateral free-trade level, and a multilateral agreement would be blocked. Bilateral agreements between countries with similar factor endowments are most likely to have this effect. It also follows that bilateral free-trade agreements can never increase political support for multilateral free trade. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.