Research and International Trade Policy Negotiations: Knowledge and Power in Latin America by Mercedes Botto

Author:Mercedes Botto [Botto, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, Trade & Tariffs, Public Policy, Economic Policy, World, General
ISBN: 9780415801911
Google: CUK9mAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 8340916
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Web pages consulted:

Working group consisting of Banxico, INEGI, SAT, and Secretaría de Economía, http://www.inegi.gob.mx

http://www.ordenjuridico.gob.mx/Federal/PL/CU/leyes/02092004(2).pdf

http://www.cedrssa.gob.mx

5 The Management of Knowledge in Trade Policy

The Case of Uruguay1

Cristina Zurbriggen

Introduction

In recent decades the international system has undergone significant changes that affect the social, economic, and political circumstances of states, and that therefore oblige countries permanently to adapt their trade policies. The newly emerging structure has created a set of rules that affect not only global trade in goods and services but also national trade and production policies, as well as the current and potential competitive advantages that the different countries could develop. Issues such as the environment, intellectual property, working conditions, investment, services, and science and technology have added new ingredients to trade and competitiveness, in addition to the classical trade negotiations on tariff and nontariff matters of the 1980s, when the Uruguay Round of the GATT began in 1986.

In this context, national states must develop new institutional capacities in the foreign trade area, so that they can act simultaneously in several negotiating forums and respond to an increasingly complex, dynamic, and technical agenda. Institutional strength in these fields arises from a complex combination of bureaucratic-administrative and political capacities. Bureaucratic capacity concerns has an impact on the efficiency of the state apparatus to mobilize its institutional, human, and technological resources in order to pursue official goals. Political capacity means the performance of the bureaucratic apparatus in its broader political context—expressed not only in relation to the legislature and the judiciary matters, but also in the way in which the state receives and prioritizes the demands expressed as public problems through the activities of actors in the political arena or through wider groups.2

This study seeks to analyze the institutional capacities of the Uruguayan state in the field of trade policy and the role of specialist knowledge in decision making. The chapter is organized as follows. First, it examines the importance of knowledge as a central element in strengthening the institutional capacities of national states in the area of foreign trade, and in enabling them to act effectively in a new international and regional context. Second, the chapter identifies the most salient features of Uruguay’s public administration in order to establish the context in which the knowledge available in the state is accessible and can be used to improve decision making. Third, the study maps the public and private organizations that produce information and conduct research on the issue, and examines the links between research output, on the one hand, and the information and training needs of public organizations, on the other. Finally, it identifies the constraints on the use of knowledge in decision-making processes, and analyzes the need to develop strategies that allow those constraints to be surmounted.

The findings are based on fieldwork in Uruguay between 2004 and 2006. The approach centered on analyzing the institutional capacities to manage trade policy during the administrations of Jorge Batlle (2000–2005) and the successor government of Tabaré Vázquez, whose term began on March 1, 2005. Attention was paid to

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