Trade-Rule Authorship

trade-rule-authorship measures structural power over the terms on which production is exchanged — who writes or blocks the rules of the trading system, whose agreement templates others adopt, and who can deny market access. The structural question is: who sets the terms of global trade? — not who has the largest trade share. This metric serves Strange's "on what terms" clause, applied to exchange.

The trading system is a Strange secondary structure (Strange 1994, p.139), folded into Production because its rule-setting content governs "on what terms" production circulates:

• "what is produced, by whom and for whom, by what method and on what terms" (Strange 1994, p.64)
• rule-laying as structural power: "[laying] down legal and administrative processes and precedents that make it hard for others to challenge or upset" (Strange 1994, p.29)
• the denial lever: "whoever is able to develop or acquire and to deny the access of others to a kind of knowledge respected and sought by others… will exercise a very special kind of structural power" (Strange 1994, p.30) — instantiated by market-access denial.

Share of trade is sheer mass — "something to sell which other people badly want" is economic, not structural, power (Strange 1994, p.25); paying a large WTO budget buys no agenda. The structural lever is who writes the rules. Strange's own warning underwrites the fold: the trading system and the other named secondary structures are "secondary to the four primary structures of security, production, finance and knowledge, which play a large part in shaping the secondary structures" (Strange 1994, p.139) — so trade rules are read through the production structure that shapes them.