Worldwide, free trade agreements (FTAs) have remained a debatable issue. This paper tries to demystify the recent myths that have surrounded the FTA strategy of India, especially as part of the Look East Policy. The paper does this by analysing the determinants of Intra-Industry Trade (IIT),...

We study the procompetitive effects of trade policies against a foreign oligopoly in a model of vertical product differentiation. We show that a uniform tariff policy like the Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause is always welfare superior to free trade because of a pure rent-extraction effect....

The vacuum left by stalled global trade negotiations has led to two tracks of negotiations in the Asia Pacific: an Asian track centered on ASEAN and a Trans-Pacific track based on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, currently in negotiation by 11 economies including the United States. Both...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations could create way-stations toward the Free Trade Agreement of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). They could yield new, regionally acceptable rules and facilitate experimentation with and adjustment to...

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...

Preferential trade agreements are meant to promote trade within the targeted region. Once such agreements are put into effect, it is interesting to investigate the impact and effectiveness in the targeted region. This paper analyzes world trade network as a graph and introduces the measure to...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, now in negotiation among nine Asia-Pacific countries, could yield annual global income gains of $295 billion (including $78 billion for the United States) and offers a pathway to free trade in the Asia-Pacific with potential gains of $1.9 trillion....

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

This Working Paper estimates the effects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) using a comprehensive, quantitative trade model, updating results reported in Petri, Plummer, and Zhai (2012) with recent data and information from the agreement. The new estimates suggest that the TPP will increase...