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Normative approaches toward international trade policy continue to be based on the neoclassical equilibrium analysis of international trade which excludes not only transaction costs of markets from explicit consideration but also fails to consider the costs of establishing and maintaining institutions of trade. The paper proposes to amend these deficiencies by recurring to D.C. North’s definition of „production costs“ as the sum of „costs of transformation“ and „costs of transactions“; it also suggests a general concept of „trade resistances“ (the importance of which has been emphasised recently, among others, by researchers like Drysdale or Milner). Although formally they might be treated like the effects of an ad valorem tariff, institutionally determined trade resistances cannot be assessed ex ante in terms of their welfare consequences, because knowledge about their structure can only be attained after a realisation of transactions. Furthermore, changing trade resistances involves political transaction costs. Institutional change in international trade, therefore, cannot follow trajectories of global optimisation but is governed by the local optimisation strategies of political entrepreneurs; the entrepreneurs pursue individual goals when supplying institutions. Institutional change engendered by their actions can only be assessed by reference to the subjective perceptions and mental models of trade (policy) on the part of the economic agents affected. Thus, institutional change is path-dependent by necessity. In addition, political entrepreneurs need to set up an internal political market where the subjective preferences of economic agents within trade regimes may be revealed and where political exchange takes place on both the demand and supply sides of institutions. However, the results of that process of revelation are interdependent with similar processes in political markets of other countries. The hypothesis that unilateral liberalisation is desirable is generally accepted. Yet the paper argues that an optimised global state can only be approximated via local optimisation on national political markets if an international institutional regime is established that governs the exchange of opportunities for market access. The fact is well documented in 20th century history. By means of this exchange, information about trade resistances and their consequences for welfare is continuously being revealed. Since international political exchange may be defined as a market with a low degree of standardisation and a high degree of uncertainty, relational contracts have emerged as one institutional device to cope with the arising problems of coordination. The recent rise of regionalism in the world economy is one particular variant of relational contracting. Within such an analytical framework, the institutions of international trade should not be assessed according to criteria of allocative efficiency in order to determine whether a particular institutional regime produces as much knowledge as possible about trade resistances and informs one about the best way to lower the resulting transaction costs on both kinds of markets, economic as well as political. The design of the market for exchanging of opportunities for market access is of crucial importance. From an evolutionary perspective regimes allowing institutional competition seem to be preferable; these regimes are not focused on territorial jurisdictions any longer. Institutional competition in fact precludes harmonisation approaches. Trade policy should be the task of regional and sectoral clubs, not of national governments. International organisations like the WTO might adopt the role of arbiter in institutional competition between those clubs.