Generally, the trade policies practiced in any economy is governed by various doctrines and philosophies, and sadly often the suggestion of panel of economists are neglected and decisions are made other way around as the trade policy could involve conflicting and complex economic and political forces. Same is also in the case of the United States; the politics are influenced by various ideologies, in general, the self-interest approach and social objective approach to trade seemed to have created a variation in using the trade restriction across the US industries.
The self-interest approach to the trade focuses on the self-interest of the political participants. Under this approach, the decision of the choice is dependent on their chances of being reelected. This approach incorporates the median-voter model, where the decision maker works in a way to satisfy the median voter leading to increase his chance of being reelected. The policy selection depends upon the fulfillment of owns self-interest and is inclined towards the desire of the majority, else he won’t be elected in next election. But the contradiction prevails in this philosophy, often free riders evolve in the voting process, who generally maintain their neutrality in voting due to opportunity cost associated with the actual voting process, these happen whenever the expected gains are small for these voters.
But the risk in the self-interest approach always prevails as the free riders may form the groups to bargain for their preference. These minority groups may lobby to pass a resolution which may be a losing game to the majority of the peoples; a phenomenon called status quo bias. Moreover, the special interest group(minority group) may influence the political outcome through the funding of the political campaigns, a process called rent seeking activity where this group attempts to influence policy in their favor by using the campaign contribution. Here a minority small group, who may get much from the policy intervention, gets certain group supports and inclines for the candidate that supports their policy. Even after the policy being unsupportive to the large group of people often due to the biases and campaign funding the minority wins to pass the policy of their choice.
Whereas in contrast, in the social objective approach to decision making, multiple dimension are valued and analyzed rather than focusing on the special interest of a specific group. The trade policy incorporates the wellbeing of various groups of people by undertaking numerous social, environmental, economic objectives like minimizing consumer loss, avoiding the erosion of real income. In this philosophy, government should abide with its strong concern for social inclusion and enhancement of standard of living.
During the Kennedy round of talk, a political agenda was on table which advocated for the unemployment compensation and retraining of workers impacted by imports from other countries, this policy is a perfect apotheosis of policy formulation under social objective approach where the policy makers had undertaken the impact in broad level and had tried to alleviate the negative impact of import in domestic industry. Whereas the president of USA, Trump’s executive order to deport Deferred Action for Childhoods Arrival(DACA) recipients could be seen as the manifestation of his ideology to support indigenous people of the USA who are claiming that immigrants are claiming their jobs. This support for native people of USA by Trump may help him to regain the votes in 2020 presidential election and is guided by the self-interest approach to policymaking.
Though it is vivid that reducing the barriers of trade makes the country better off, various political philosophies create a variation in the formulation and imposition of these restrictions. Self-interest approach is myopic on their concern, in contrast, social objective approach manifests to incorporate integrative social approach. In general, often politician are entangled in groups of people attempting to influence trade policy, in such scenario, the advice of economist based on principles and fundaments are ignored. If the social objective is chosen, it would create social change and may make inclusive economy helping the marginalized segment but the chances of pleasuring the vested interest of policymakers of self-interest group always prevail in self-interest approach as they may refund for your coming election. And it won't be wrong to say that the above mentioned two philosophies shall always remain in the American economy
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