The salience of tariffs, quotas, and other import restrictions in current discussionsof trade policy obscures what may well become a more significant form of government intervention: subsidized export promotion. Over the past two decades, subsidized trade finance has been one of the most widely used instruments of export promotion. This article offers an historical description and a theoretical explanation for the success of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Export Credit Arrangement, an international regime restricting the provision of subsidized trade finance. The explanation emphasizes three factors: the structure of government institutions, the relative power of states, and the functional value of information. More generally, the analysis demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of monocausal explanations of international cooperation and the advantages of explanations based on a conception of international cooperation as a multistage, process, each stage of which may be explained by a separate theory.

In multilateral trade negotiations, trade-offs usually are made within the issue-areas that are on the agenda. In the absence of cross-issue trade-offs (linkages), agreement may not be possible. To maximize both the potential gains from trade and the scope for agreement, negotiators need to be willing and able to consider the feasibility of issue linkages. This raises the practical problem of determining when such trade-offs are likely to be necessary. Although quantitative methods of policy analysis have been developed, they have not been widely used by policymakers, in part owing to the fact that negotiations focus largely on nontariff measures. This article proposes a qualitative approach to the problem and applies it to the Tokyo and Uruguay Round negotiations on safeguards to protect domestic industries from problems related to increases in imports.

This article presents a cross-national analysis of the relationship between domestic political regime changes and voting realignments of Third World nations in the United Nations (UN). It seeks to move beyond existing research that has assumed that foreign policy is rooted in political and economic structures and changes only when a political revolution occurs. It argues that a wider variety of regime changes—ranging from those involving mainstream political parties to milder ones such as factional shifts in single-party regimes—can also provoke major realignments. Using a new data set on Third World regimes, the article examines the impact of regime changes for eighty-seven nations on their UN voting patterns during the period from 1946 to 1984. Although the findings indicate that revolutions are most likely to provoke major voting realignments, they also show that the more frequent, nonrevolutionary types of regime change are associated with many voting realignments. A major implication of these findings is that foreign policy changes reflect a complex set of domestic regime factors, including leadership belief systems and internal political constraints, as well as aspects of political structure.