Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive.

Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade.

Cornelia Woll is a Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po Paris, France, and the winner of the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize from the Society of Comparative Research in 2005.

This is a truly excellent book that should take the field of international political economy in promising directions. Firm Interests deserves a wide audience of political scientists, policymakers, economists, and scholars of management, public policy, and business-government relations.... It will help us to make better sense of how firms' managers decide what is best and, as well, how firms attempt to influence policies in their favor.... Woll has engaged in impressive field research to find out what firms wanted and why, combining prodigious secondary research with primary interviews at many of the firms that participated in some of the most important trade debates of the past 20 years.