The effects of free trade areas on non-members: Modelling Kemp-Vanek admissibility

A multi-sector multi-country Numerical General Equilibrium model is used to endogenously determine the trade taxes that FTA members need to charge on non-member trade so that after the FTA is formed, FTA-member trade volumes with non-members remain at their pre-FTA level. We apply the notion of Kemp-Vanek admissibility in McMillan [McMillan, J. (1993), Does regional integration foster open trade? Economic theory and GATT's Article XXIV" In Anderson, K. & R. Blackhurst (Eds.), Regional Integration and the Global Trading System. London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf] to construct an FTA which does not make non-members of the FTA worse off, ensuring that the FTA is necessarily a building block and not a stumbling block to global free trade. We implement the path-independent welfare decomposition in Harrison et al. [Harrison, G., Rutherford, T. & Wooton, I. (1993). An alternative welfare decomposition for customs unions. Canadian Journal of Economics, 26(4), 961-68]. Results of such experiments are relevant to the current debate under the WTO's Doha Round of trade negotiations over GATT (1994) Article XXIV which evaluates the consistency of FTAs with the WTO.