The authors show in this paper that increasing the transparency of the trading environment can be an important complement to traditional liberalization of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Our definition of transparency is grounded in a transaction cost analysis. The authors focus on two...

The authors estimate that the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the EU-MERCOSUR agreement, and multilateral trade policy changes will all be beneficial for Brazil. The Brazilian government strategy of simultaneously negotiating the FTAA and the EU-MERCOSUR agreement, while supporting...

The authors provide an overview of the preferential rules of origin in East Asia, highlighting the aspects that might possibly generate some trade-chilling effects. They review characteristics of existing preferential trade agreements with special emphasis on lessons from the European...

Subregional trade arrangements (RTAs) in Eastern and Southern Africa have proliferated in the past 10 to 15 years. The small size of most of the countries in the region, some of which are landlocked, and the security needs in the post independence period largely explain the rapid expansion....

The literature on regional integration agreements (RIAs) is vast and deals with political, economic, and political economy issues. The literature on the economics of RIAs deals mostly with static effects, and concludes that these effects are, in general, ambiguous. So far there has been no...

Using a multisector, computable general equilibrium model, the authors examine Chile's strategy of negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with all of its significant trading partners (referring to this policy as additive regionalism). They also evaluate the Free Trade Agreement of the...

The author considers the policy options of the West Bank and Gaza with respect to trade and the export of labor services. He concludes that: 1) Nondiscriminatory trade policy is unambiguously superior to a free trade agreement with Israel; 2) The West Bank and Gaza should pursue a...

This paper empirically studies the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. The paper uses variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks and examines...

Can regionalism do what multilateralism has so far failed to do—promote greater openness of services markets? Although previous research has pointed to the wider and deeper legal commitments under regional agreements as proof that it can, no previous study has assessed the impact of such...

The author examines the impact of various trade policies for small developing states in the face of changing international trends - including globalization, the proliferation of regional integration agreements, the changing relationship between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries and...