The international trade environment is changing rapidly. Great power politics, a competition of ideas and systems, cold and hot conflicts as well as wars threaten to divide the world into new blocks – large autocracies on one side and liberal democracies on the other – and many countries in the middle. Trade is more and more seen from a security lens: as a source of national vulnerabilities on one hand side, and as coercive, strategic instrument on the other. This will massively impact trade flows, accelerating the re-regionalization and re-nationalization of value chains, which started a few years ago and gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic, also fueled by the power competition between the United States and China. At the same time, the WTO, which is already fragile, is threatened to be weakened even further – at a time when a strong institution is more important than ever.
“The Political Economy of World Trade” aims at providing a hands-on approach to the analysis of international trade relations. This course has a strong policy orientation, using current issues and challenges in trade policy-making as the starting point of each session. Economic research and theoretical elements will be studied to come to concrete policy options. Our class features five sections: 1. drivers of world trade; 2. the political economy of trade policy-making; 3. the multilateral trading system; 4. preferential trade agreements, 5. a critical look at trade.