Content area
Full Text
The characterization of the products of international cooperation as public goods has been severely challenged, undermining a central pillar of theories of international cooperation. I review the criticism of public goods assumptions, identifying the need to account for both exclusion and rival consumption in international cooperative arrangements. Drawing on the recent debate of states as relative versus absolute gains maximizers, I offer a characterization of international cooperative arrangements as discriminatory clubs. I develop a refined relative gains model, which focuses on relative net gains, and apply it to a hypothetical situation to illustrate its usefulness in predicting patterns of exclusion and distribution in international trade.
Most realist and liberal theories of international economic cooperation begin with the assumption that such cooperation produces public goods. While this assumption has been severely challenged (Conybeare, 1984; Gowa, 1989; Oye, 1992; Snidal, 1985), it remains implicit to much recent work. In his analysis of multilateralism, Ruggie (1992, p. 571) implies an assumption of publicness when he claims that multilateral arrangements rest on the organizing principles of indivisibility of membership and "diffuse reciprocity," which he defines as an outcome yielding "... a rough equivalence of benefits in the aggregate and over time." This assumption is echoed by Caporaso (1992) and Martin (1992). One reason for the continued reliance on assumptions of publicness might be that while publicness has been challenged, no alternative characterization of the product of international cooperation has been offered. In this paper I construct a model of international economic cooperation, characterizing its product not as a pure public good, but as a club good, i.e., one that is characterized by common consumption but which may be of rival supply and from which some actors may be excluded.
Characterizing international cooperation as a club offers several benefits. It permits us to broaden our conception of economic cooperation beyond the all-ornothing requirements of the public goods assumptions of nonrival supply and nonexclusiveness. Relaxing the assumption of nonexclusiveness requires us to focus on the patterns of membership, some of which may be exclusive. Relaxing the assumption of nonrivalry leads us to focus more closely on distribution patterns within the regime, which may entail rival supply. By characterizing cooperative arrangements as providing only impure public goods we thus gain opportunities...