Government rationality and international economic policy coordination

When economists theorize on government or state choices, they implicitly allude to an institutional composite agent expressing the will of an assorted set of individuals and groups. They usually clarify that the state’s choices are grounded on aggregate preferences, but they leave ill-defined how these collective preferences are formed. Certainly, economists hypothesize that governments have some kind of rationality similar to that of individuals, although they are aware that this is hard to define for a representative or elected subject. But it is a fact that the state/government is called upon to establish international relationships, to deal with peers, and to decide on the basis of both domestic and foreign variables. In short, a government must behave as a decision-maker whose choices are weighed according to the principle of rationality. My aim in this paper is to grasp this ‘particular’ rationality by investigating theories on international economic policy coordination – that is, a specific kind of economic relation among states.