Continued dependence on expensive imported liquid fuels puts stress on the relations among and the domestic performance of the members of OECD. Coordinated energy R&D could in principle lessen those stresses and also benefit other liquid fuel consumers. A political economy approach can help explain the tepid pursuit of this possibility in two ways. First, it can clarify the reasons for the weak collective action energy R&D record of the members of the OECD both before and after the oil events of 1973. Second, it can demonstrate and identify the nature of the undersupply of the public good of energy knowledge. The history of this area illustrates several general obstacles to the provision of public goods in realistically complex political situations. These include the uncertain and distant nature of commitments to actually deliver collective goods in the absense of self-enforcing agreements, unwillingness to jeopardize possible future private advantages, and the tendencies to link provision of particular public goods to cooperation by other parties with the provider on a host of other matters. In effect, the attempts of particular statesmen to tie energy R&D cooperation to other issues reinforce tendencies to view the choices not as ones about the level of provision of public goods, but rather as ones about national shares of private goods—economic, military, and political.

Export promotion has replaced import substitution as the orthodox strategy for economic development. In sectors dominated by transnational corporations, however, such a strategy may run afoul of difficulties not immediately apparent from the neo-classical comparative-advantage perspective that has provided its principal theoretical support. Evidence from the Mexican automobile industry shows that an export promotion policy may face problems of a) demand rigidities in TNC intracompany transfers, b) decision dependency, c) difficulties in enforcing sanctions in cases of recalcitrance, and d) an unequal distribution of benefits between foreign-owned and domestically-owned firms.

In the mid 1950s, West German industry changed from being oriented primarily towards internal and West European reconstruction needs and the supply of coal and steel, to being more oriented towards the international market of finished goods. Whereas prewar and war-time technology had dominated production processes and products up until then, U.S. competition started to force advanced technologies like computers and atomic energy upon industry.

Along with increased instability in the general political and economic situation of West Germany these changes contributed greatly to progressive differentiation within what had been a more homogenous industry structure and within the West German state apparatus.

One important result of these new trends was the genesis of a foreign atomic policy, resulting in the founding of Euratom. Global versus European orientation, traditional versus “modern” industries, traditional liberal versus new interventionalist policies were joined in the issue and produced a highly ambivalent result. In the attempt to explain and interpret the case of Euratom in this context, theories of integration and of state are tested. The greatest explanatory power is conceded to modern Marxist theories which combine the concept of international dependency with a differentiated concept of relations between state and industry.

Suggested from the study of budgeting, the quasi-budgeting framework is used to analyze a certain type of negotiation. Three pre-conditions are spelled out for using this framework. A simple structural equation model to account for how negotiation outcomes are determined on the basis of the Soviet-Japanese salmon catch negotiations in the Northwest Pacific for the 1957–1977 period is presented. The estimation results for the 1957–1976 period as well as the predictive performance for the 1977 negotiations are demonstrated to be fairly good, thereby suggesting that the quasi-budgeting framework is both conceptually powerful and methodologically feasible in the study of various international negotiations.