The Politics of Australia's International Economic Relations: Adjustment and Two-Level Games.

Economic adjustment, a political priority for Labor governments throughout the second half of the 1980s, and in contrast to earlier Australian scholarship and practice, is now recognised to be an internationally, as well as a domestically, determined and constrained enterprise. Theoretical developments in international political economy in North America of late have provided a variety of approaches for conceptualising this twofold enterprise. Taking two cases (the development of the Cairns Group and its activities in the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations and the development of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) this paper looks at two of these approaches-to show how they can contribute to the understanding of international economic policy under Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]