of “Aggressively Unilateral” U.S. Trade Actions

“Aggressively unilateral ” is what America’s trading partners call actions under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The provisions themselves are more than twenty years old; the epithet is of more recent vintage. A helpful analog for those not familiar with the provisions is to labor relations; initiatives under Section 301 are similar to grievance proceedings under a collective-bargaining agreement. ’ Certain aspects are similar to litigation.2 There have been roughly one hundred formal 301 proceedings since 1974, at least thirty others that were discouraged or withdrawn at an early stage, and an unknown number that were considered, rumored, or fantasized! Our main interest is in the determinants of various types of resolution and irresolution of 301 actions, from the perspective of negotiators and their con-stituents. Our main contributions are to apply familiar statistical methods to detect and size up these determinants and then to report the robustness of the results. These statistical approaches extend and complement the exhaustive historical and case-study evaluations of Bayard and Elliott (1994). ’ We also update that study, adding fifteen cases to the seventy-two considered there