This paper studies the impact of the process of accession to the WTO on growth rates in a sample of 150 economies. Unlike GATT-era accessions, WTO accessions involve reforms that extend beyond conventional trade liberalization measures. Using information on the pace of negotiations and requests...

World Trade Organization (WTO) accession is a challenging process typically commanding a heavy price in terms of resources and time expended while also calling for the expense of non-trivial political capital by an acceding country's policymakers. Nevertheless, gaining membership of the world...

This paper studies the impact of the process of accession to the WTO on growth rates in a sample of 150 economies. Unlike GATT-era accessions, WTO accessions involve reforms that extend beyond conventional trade liberalization measures. Using information on the pace of negotiations and requests...

We study the effect of heterogeneous monopsony power across Chinese firms on the equilibrium allocation of labor. Based on the fact that heterogeneity in monopsony power results from the heterogeneity in workers’ preferences for the jobs provided by an individual firm, we build a model to...

In examining the effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the amounts of Aid for Trade (AfT) that accrue to developing countries, Lee et al. (2015) (The World Economy, 38, 2015 and 1462) have found that developing country members of the World Trade Organization (WTO)...

This paper investigates the impact of import competition on energy efficiency among firms in China. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits industry- and firm-level tariff reductions following China's accession to the WTO, we examine the effects of reduced output tariffs on coal...

The efficacy of the World Trade Organization (WTO), as an international forum seeking to provide a uniform platform to Member States for bilateral and multilateral negotiations and further the spirit of a new international economic legal order, is challenged constantly. This article explains how...

China, the EU and the U.S. are the world’s largest traders, and many of the tensions in the trading system arise in the relations among them. Our premise is that reforming WTO is a necessary condition for the organization to be a more salient forum for the three large economies to address...

This study empirically demonstrates that there is indeed a positive relationship between trade and peace, by specifically showing that the physical state of peace and the structural elements of peace contribute to a country’s WTO membership, while WTO accession also contributes to achieving...

We study the impact of trade-induced changes in labor market conditions on violence within the household. We exploit the local labor demand shocks generated by Cambodia's WTO accession to assess how changes in the employment of women relative to men affected the risk of intimate partner...

This paper studies how the reduction in trade policy uncertainty (TPU) associated with the US granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China affects the development of Chinese manufacturing industries. We find that eliminating TPU causes industries' employment expansion yet has a...

China, the EU and the U.S. are the world’s largest traders, and many of the tensions in the trading system arise in the relations among them. Our premise is that reforming WTO is a necessary condition for the organization to be a more salient forum for the three large economies to address...

We quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of GATT/WTO membership on trade and welfare. Using an extensive database covering manufacturing trade for 186 countries over the period 1980-2016, we find that the average impact of GATT/WTO membership on trade among member countries is...

LDCs acceding to the World Trade Organization have a hard negotiation road to travel, and much to learn from previous successful accessions. While many of those negotiations were done privately, much can still be garnered by looking at the evolution of those countries’ procurement policies,...

We examine the role of trade policy uncertainty in shaping the import decisions of firms. If the adoption of a new input requires a sunk cost investment, then the prospect of price increases in that input, e.g. due to trade barriers, reduces the adoption of that input (a substitution effect) and...

I study how trade liberalization, or more specifically, WTO accession by China in 2001, affects industry dynamics: entry, exit, and innovation in China. Using various identification strategies (DDD, IV, DD), I find that the trade liberalization has the following causal impacts: (1) in the short...

China’s rapid rise as a leading global exporter of manufacturing goods since its accession to the WTO in 2001 has been the focus of both admiration and, increasingly, concern, but China is also a large importer of goods, particularly agricultural products. Since China's accession to the WTO,...

We quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of GATT/WTO membership on trade and welfare. Using an extensive database covering manufacturing trade for 186 countries over the period 1980-2016, we find that the average impact of GATT/WTO membership on trade among member counties is...

This paper investigates the effect of export liberalization on exporters’ financial leverage. With the ASIF and CCST matched data on Chinese exporter leverage around WTO China’s accession , we identify a negative causal effect of export liberalization, removal the trade policy uncertainty,...

We formalize the GATT/WTO principle of reciprocity in workhorse quantitative trade models, characterizing reciprocal tariff cuts that hold terms of trade fixed and investigating their labor-market impacts. We provide closed-form expressions mapping reciprocal tariff cuts to labor market...

Do stronger intellectual property rights incentivize female participation in innovation? We provide new evidence on this question using a unique database of artificial intelligence patents publicly shared by the USPTO. Our identification strategy leverages China's WTO TRIPs accession, which led...

This article explores the effect of WTO membership and the duration of this membership on the utilization of non-reciprocal trade preferences (NRTPs) offered by the QUAD countries (Canada, European Union, Japan and the United States). It uses an unbalanced dataset of 136 beneficiaries of NRTPs...

How did a country join the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade(“GATT”)? How does a country become a member of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”)?GATT Articles XXXII-XXXIII and WTO Agreement Articles XI-XII provide the answers. To examine these provisions in the context of China’s...

For 22 years, the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been discussing how to govern e-commerce and the data that underpins it. In 2019, some 74 (now 86) nations began to negotiate e-commerce. These talks are conducted in secret and little is known about how they are progressing....

This paper documents and assesses the significance of the policy changes in China that WTO accession implies in 3 key service categories (banking, insurance, and telecoms), asking whether it is likely they will really be fully implemented in their entirety as undertaken at signature in 2002....

This paper analyzes the appropriate sequencing between accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the implementation of the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC) customs union and whether the latter facilitates or delays WTO accession for some member countries of the Commonwealth of...

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the WTO, this paper re-estimates the impact of WTO accession on growth. Joining the multilateral trading system not only expands access to international markets but also requires commitment to domestic reforms. Tang and Wei (2009) showed that there is...