Foreign Economic Policy

This chapter provides an overview of foreign economic policy. First, it defines the subject as it relates to the discipline of Political Science in order to demonstrate how this discipline’s research on foreign economic policy is problem-centered and what problem is its focus: explaining the variation in policy related to trade, external investment, capital, exchange rates, and immigration. Second, it reviews two major research programs related to this problem: the state-level variation based on political regime type and the individual-level preference variation for different foreign economic policies. Third, this chapter highlights the obstacle to connecting these two research programs: how to explain outcomes at the state-level based on preferences at the individual-level.