This book assesses the politics and programs of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and their relevance to U.S. trade policy. Focusing on the direct loan program for large credits with maturities of more than five years, the authors evaluate the broad criteria employed by the Bank in its decision-making process and the resulting allocation of Bank resources. They also examine the distribution of Bank loans and subsidies across industries and relate this to key industry characteristics such as comparative advantage and export dependence. The problems faced by the Eximbank in recent years-high borrowing costs, intensified export credit competition, limited resources, increased risks, conflicting mandates to be competitive yet self-sustaining --have given tremendous importance to the careful articulation of policy and administration of programs. The authors find Bank policies to be broadly supportive of the U.S. trade policy goals, but also identify several areas of inconsistency and lack of definition and offer alternative means of specifying criteria to overcome these problems.

This book assesses the politics and programs of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and their relevance to U.S. trade policy. Focusing on the direct loan program for large credits with maturities of more than five years, the authors evaluate the broad criteria employed by the Bank in its decision-making process and the resulting allocation of Bank resources. They also examine the distribution of Bank loans and subsidies across industries and relate this to key industry characteristics such as comparative advantage and export dependence. The problems faced by the Eximbank in recent years-high borrowing costs, intensified export credit competition, limited resources, increased risks, conflicting mandates to be competitive yet self-sustaining --have given tremendous importance to the careful articulation of policy and administration of programs. The authors find Bank policies to be broadly supportive of the U.S. trade policy goals, but also identify several areas of inconsistency and lack of definition and offer alternative means of specifying criteria to overcome these problems.

The political force of feminism cannot be separated from the theories which give it that force. an effective feminist literary criticism must negotiate its relationship to the dominant male voice of traditional practices. Can it change that voice for new ends, or is it robbed of purpose by the inevitably partiarchal nature of traditional discourse?
The essays in this book address this question in a complex set of exploratory dialogues between men and women. They open with interchanges on the philosophical foundations of feminist criticisms and questions about the mechanisms of representation. A second group of essays focus on the gendered body in the act of writing and on individual identity and experience in critical theory. Does theory elide questions of gender, race and class? Or does it help illuminate those differences by historicizing and politicizing the body? The further dialogues initiated here probe the network of relations between author, reader, critic and society in discussing the feminization of genres and the problematic of race.
Rather than striving for pluralistic consensus as they interrogate the relations of feminism and theory, the many voices presented here employ a dialogic model to create a productive and enlivening debate.