The Political Origins of Rules of Origin - Talk by In Song Kim, Associate Professor of Political Science, MIT

Rules of Origin (RoO) have emerged as one of the primary policy instruments amid deepening global value chains. Despite their significance, the scholarly understanding of how RoO interact with other trade policies remains limited. We propose a theory that elucidates the political origins of RoO. Specifically, we argue that RoO enable governments to concurrently appeal to three distinct political constituencies by: (1) protecting downstream producers, (2) providing export subsidies for upstream producers, and (3) reinforcing the existing global production networks shaped by multinational corporations (MNCs). To empirically test this argument, we construct the first comprehensive dataset on RoO, encompassing 121 PTAs at the product level among 85 countries. We find that downstream producers tend to demand stringent RoO as a substitute for tariff protection, while upstream substitutable producers use RoO as a form of export subsidy. By merging our data with Chinese Customs Data (2000-2013), we also demonstrate that MNCs can shape the formulation of RoO to maintain and expand their global production networks.

In Song Kim is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University. His current research interests include firm-level lobbying on trade policies, product-level trade policy-making, and the interaction between domestic political institutions and international trade. Professor Kim is also interested in the development of quantitative methods for causal inference with panel data, "big data" analysis, network models, and estimating political actors' preferred policy outcomes. He is developing a large-scale database on lobbying supported by the National Science Foundation. His dissertation won the 2015 Mancur Olson Award for the Best Dissertation in political economy. An article version of this research received the 2018 Michael Wallerstein Award for the best published article in political economy. In Song Kim conducts Big Data analysis of international trade. He is developing methods for dimension reduction and visualization to investigate how the structure of international trade around the globe has evolved over time. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in various academic journals, including the American Political Science Review,  American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and The Journal of Politics.

Sponsored by the Department of Government & Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.  Free and open to the public.

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