TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gawande,Kishore
AU  - Krishna,Pravin
AU  - Olarreaga,Marcelo
TI  - What Governments Maximize and Why: The View from Trade
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14953
PY  - 2009
Y2  - May 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14953
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14953.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kishore Gawande
Bush School of Government
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77840-4220
E-Mail: kgawande@tamu.edu

Pravin Krishna
Johns Hopkins University
1740 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202/663 5733
Fax: 202/663 7718
E-Mail: Pravin_Krishna@jhu.edu

Marcelo Olarreaga
Department of Political Economy
University of Geneva
Uni Mail, 102 Bd Carl-Vogt, CH-1211 Geneve 4
E-Mail: Marcelo.Olarreaga@ecopo.unige.ch
AB  - Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and institutional factors. Trade policy, being fundamentally redistributive, provides a valuable context in which the welfare mindedness of governments may be empirically evaluated. This paper investigates quantitatively the welfare mindedness of governments and attempts to understand these political and institutional determinants of the differences in government behavior across countries.
ER  -