This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practise. Second, free trade areas generally involve unharmonized...

Assume that government maximizes the well being of its citizens subject to technological, political, and informational constraints. How should equilibrium be perturbed so that equilibrium post-perturbation quantities satisfy new exogenously-specified bounds? We prove an intervention principle...

This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade for free trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practice. Second, free trade areas generally involve...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale\' model to allow for di®erent...

We use a multi-country asymmetric oligopolistic framework for segmented markets to study the welfare effects of reducing tariff discriminations - which we call a move towards Most Favored Nation tariffs. Both unilateral and multilateral reforms are considered. We investigate this issue under...

This paper examines the extent to which tariff cooperation is observed among World Trade Organization (WTO) members. With the help of a simple political economy model, we show that tariffs are positively correlated with the importer's market power when they are set non-cooperatively, but...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the protection for sale' model to allow for different...