The visible hand: The United States, Japan, and the management of trade disputes

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Abstract
What is the pattern of trade conflict and cooperation between the United States and Japan, and what does the pattern tell us about the way these trading partners manage their trade disputes? Contrary to the general wisdom that the imbalance in US‐Japanese trade relations has caused increasing amounts of conflictual behavior between the two countries, we find fluctuating amounts of conflictual and cooperative trade behavior, at least in the period from 1948 to 1978. Cooperative behavior, we assert, is an attempt to manage trade conflict. This study treats trade disputes as examples of international conflict. We analyze the relative amounts and intensities of conflictual and cooperative behavior to shed light on the trends and processes of US‐Japanese commercial rivalries. Our hypothesis is that periods of intensified conflictual trade behavior have been managed consistently by increased levels of cooperative trade behavior. We corroborate this hypothesis using Azar's (1982) Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB), an events data set. For this analysis, we formalize Azar's (1972) concept of a normal relations range and develop a method of summarizing sequential events into “turns.”