Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- POLITICS AND TRADE COOPERATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- PART ONE COOPERATION AND VARIATION
- PART TWO DOMESTIC POLITICS AND TRADE POLICY
- PART THREE POLITICAL SUPPORT AND TRADE COOPERATION
- 6 The Trade Agreements Database
- 7 Political Support and Trade Treaties
- 8 Variations in Trade Cooperation
- 9 Ratification and Trade Treaties
- PART FOUR NORMS AND COOPERATION
- PART FIVE CONCLUSIONS
- References
- Index
6 - The Trade Agreements Database
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- POLITICS AND TRADE COOPERATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- PART ONE COOPERATION AND VARIATION
- PART TWO DOMESTIC POLITICS AND TRADE POLICY
- PART THREE POLITICAL SUPPORT AND TRADE COOPERATION
- 6 The Trade Agreements Database
- 7 Political Support and Trade Treaties
- 8 Variations in Trade Cooperation
- 9 Ratification and Trade Treaties
- PART FOUR NORMS AND COOPERATION
- PART FIVE CONCLUSIONS
- References
- Index
Summary
“There is, unfortunately, a kind of alchemy about figures which transforms the most dubious materials into something pure and precious; hence the price of working with historical statistics is eternal vigilance.”
– Thomas Carlyle (cited in Landes 1998: 196fn)Having examined autonomous trade policies in Part II, I now turn to cooperation, the central focus of this book. Part III examines the conditions that make a country more or less likely to engage in cooperation than other countries or that make it more or less willing to cooperate over time. The focus is on cross-national differences between countries, building on the country-level and intertemporal analyses of Part II.
Studying cooperation requires both a definition and an operationalization of the term. This chapter provides first a definition of cooperation and then discusses the Trade Agreements Database (TAD) that I use to operationalize cooperation. Many of the decisions here reflect the fact that cooperation is a dichotomous concept, not a continuous one, and that I wish to explain both cross-national and intertemporal variation in cooperation. These theoretical issues point toward count variables for each country in the trading system.
I next define several variables derived from TAD that I use throughout the rest of the book. Foremost among these are the number of treaties that a country initiates each year and the number of treaties that each country has in effect at a given moment.
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- Politics and Trade Cooperation in the Nineteenth CenturyThe 'Agreeable Customs' of 1815–1914, pp. 157 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007