La economía política global es un campo de investigación que tiende a centrarse en la proyección del poder como una acción intencional. Sin embargo, cuando observamos el comercio internacional vemos que las empresas comprometidas que participan del mismo adaptarán sus métodos de producción para ajustarse a los estándares, regulaciones y necesidades del mercado en el que pueden obtener los mayores beneficios. Su comportamiento tiende a reforzarse posteriormente con políticas y reglas en sus mercados domésticos generándose un proceso de convergencia con las reglas desarrolladas por la potencia extranjera. En este sentido, un país que posee un mercado grande y abierto puede forzar una convergencia de las reglas internacionales en beneficio de sus propios intereses sin proyectar poder deliberadamente en terceros países. El objetivo de la investigación actual es analizar si China, como mercado masivo de productos agrícolas latinoamericanos (llegando a un punto de dependencia comercial), ha tenido un efecto similar en las regulaciones y estándares agrícolas nacionales de estos países. El enfoque territorial estará en Chile, Argentina y Brasil, ya que estos son los mayores mercados de exportación agrícola de América Latina hacia China. En términos de temas, nos enfocaremos en la cuestión de los OGM. ¿Podemos hablar de un "Efecto de Beijing" en América Latina?

China and New Zealand were able to sign a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2008, in spite of the large differences in standards under which they were respectively negotiating trade agreements in the international arena. This article starts with a descriptive analysis of these differences between each country’s standards in terms of FTA quality. With the description of these standards, which seem to stand on opposite sides of a continuum, we examine why China and New Zealand decided to forego the standards under which they had negotiated previous agreements in order to find a middle ground. This process of convergence showcases how the interests of both parties moved them towards the adoption of a middle ground which enabled them to negotiate a win-win agreement.

The following article aims to discern whether partial protectionism in Taiwan’s meat markets can still be explained as a function of Taiwan’s ‘strong state argument’, which was developed to understand the nation’s policies between the 1960s and 1980s. In spite of a weak international position, Taiwan has been able to sustain a policy of agricultural protection, based on the unitary rationality of its domestic bureaucratic units and a centralised process of decision-making. The institutional path dependence witnessed in agricultural trade policy can help explain why, for example, Taiwan is able to ban imports of agricultural items from the United States and Japan, which are two of Taiwan’s largest supporters in the international arena. The article analyses the domestic structure of agricultural market access decision-making, in order to shed light on how this structure is used to leverage trade-offs in other areas where Taiwan’s bargaining position is weaker, given its international status; and thus it revises Taiwan’s strong state argument as causal towards explaining agricultural protectionism.

While embracing trade policies that foster trade liberalization, Taiwan has clear protectionist policies covering its agricultural trade, which combine border measures with domestic support, and are closely modeled on the policies created by the European Union. The idea of multifunctionality of agriculture — and its link to trade policy — has created a normative framework whereby the agricultural markets have to be shielded in order for them to provide non-commodity attributes or public goods. This paper aims to explore the causal power of ideas (liberalization and multifunctionality) in the definition of Taiwan’s agricultural trade policy, by analyzing them from the perspective of historical institutionalism, and taking Taiwan as a case study. It is the institutionalization of the idea of multifunctionality that gives it an explanatory power toward understanding the ideational source of protectionism in agricultural trade.