The Dominant Narrative of the New Zealand–China Free Trade Agreement: Peripheral Evidence, Presumptive Tilt and Business Realities

ABSTRACT

New Zealand (NZ) was the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China. Afterwards, the NZ government crafted a narrative to encourage businesses to pursue opportunities there and in emerging Asia more generally to enact the enabling institutional change. Our study shows neoliberal free-trade rhetoric matched and thus likely confirmed businesses’ opportunity perceptions but often mismatched their capabilities and thus interests. Businesses sampled predictably lacked scale, scope and other resources to realise the opportunities they perceived. We argue government communications tilted businesses towards the simplifying presumption that substantial opportunities lay within fairly easy grasp. As a result, over-enactment in entering the Chinese market followed. We identify the construct of ‘peripheral evidence’ as propping up presumptive tilt here and generally – irrelevant but widely observable facts or well-accepted predictions and opinion inappropriately shifted to centre-stage. Such centring discourages critical discourse and displaces properly central considerations – here the fundamental obstacles of size, scale and resources. Our study contributes to constructivist institutionalism by showing the mechanisms and tangible risks of uncritical pro-enactment discourse after formal trade liberalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Enabling institutional change
• constructivist institutionalism
• free trade agreement
• firm strategy
• trade liberalisation
• enactment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The University of Auckland.

Notes on contributors

Antje Fiedler

Antje Fiedler is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the Graduate School of Management, University of Auckland. Her research interests include institutions and institutional change, and small business strategy and internationalisation.

Benjamin Fath

Benjamin P Fath is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the Graduate School of Management, University of Auckland. His research interests lie in the study of innovation, growth and internationalisation of SMEs.

D Hugh Whittaker

D Hugh Whittaker is Professor of the Japanese Economy and Business at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow (and former Director) of the New Zealand Asia Institute, University of Auckland. His research interests include entrepreneurship, innovation management and comparative development in East Asia.