To analyse the role that the World Trade Organization (WTO) plays in enforcing international trade agreements, this paper first explores what countries can achieve alone by characterizing optimal private trigger strategies (PTS) under which each country triggers a punishment phase by imposing an...

This paper uses recursive methods to characterize the payoff frontier of self-enforcing trade agreements between countries of asymmetric size. We show that at points on the frontier where only one country's incentive constraint binds, the efficient agreement will be a non-stationary one that...

This paper uses recursive methods to characterize the payoff frontier of self-enforcing trade agreements between countries of asymmetric size. We show that at points on the frontier where only one country's incentive constraint binds, the efficient agreement will be a non-stationary one that...