Why are trade agreements regional? I address this question in a model of oligopoly featuring product variety. Tariffs have the effect of manipulating a country's terms of trade and shifting profits towards the domestic market at the expense of foreign trade partners. Countries endogenously form...

Trade policy in Asia has switched from non-discriminatory unilateral liberalisation, reinforced by GATT/ WTO commitments, to discriminatory FTAs. The paper surveys the FTA activity of the major regional players: China, India, the ASEAN countries, Japan and South Korea. It concludes that emerging...

This paper critically examines "new" evidence from the gravity model that indicates the majority of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) today are predominantly trade diverting. This new evidence on trade diversion was presented in a recent Australia Productivity Commission (APC) working...

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries whose joint gross domestic products (GDPs) account for 36 percent of world GDP and whose mutual trade accounts for approximately 24 percent of world trade. As for most proposed free trade...

The Trump Administration has pursued a sharply different – and for its trade partners unsettling – trade policy from that followed by the United States in the postwar period. While much attention has been focussed on the oftentimes contradictory, oftentimes theoretically unfounded, and...

[The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) presents strong potential to mold regional trade and investment patterns well into the future and to influence the direction of global economic cooperation at a challenging time. This paper provides detailed estimates on the effects of the...

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. The authors find...

The political economy of international trade decision-making within the United States is complex and ever-changing. The debates over the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the associated efforts of the Obama Administration to obtain Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), highlight...

We investigate the response of US trucking firms to the removal of barriers to crossborder trucking under NAFTA. This was done via a program implemented in 2007, cancelled in 2009, and reinstated in 2011. We find that, unsurprisingly, the program's start resulted in lower stock returns,...