The problem in context: how does France participate in multilateral trade negotiations?

France is a major trading power and has steadily followed a long-term path of trade liberalization since the launch of the European Common Market. ‘France's exports rank fourth for goods and third for services, with a structural surplus representing approximately 2 per cent of GDP. Five millions jobs are based on exports. Foreign companies are responsible for one-third of our industrial production.’ While not directly engaged in negotiations in the WTO, France participates in the European common trade policy and is deemed a ‘pivotal’ state, particularly on agriculture. Yet little research attention has been devoted to the political economy of trade reform in France.

This study surveys French decision-making relating to trade, from summer 2002 to the Cancún WTO Ministerial. It focuses on market access issues, which by no means embrace France's trade negotiating priorities. Following Rodrik, we assume that ‘all the political economy models provide a particular story about how organized groups or individual voters can take political action to reinforce or alleviate the income-distributional consequences of trade flows … The conclusion in common is: trade is not free because politically influential groups can be made better off by policy interventions on trade.’

One of the suggestions presented in this paper is that standard assumptions about the influence of organized groups on trade reforms are globally verified: France's political economy entails no cultural exception.