Assessing the Impact of Trade Liberalization: The Case of Jordan

This paper assesses the impact of Jordan’s substantial trade liberalization over the last two decades. Using a gravity model, a large country sample, and a long time-series, we estimate the effects of various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) accession on both Jordan’s exports and imports. Overall, we find that the impact has been rather small, as no statistically significant and robust impact on exports and imports can be found due to multilateral or preferential trade liberalization. However, there is one exception: the FTA with the United States of America has boosted Jordan’s exports to the US to a considerable degree.