Modern regional trade agreements focus on promoting bilateral exchange mostly by lowering non-tariff barriers to trade. But do existing regional trade agreements actually deliver what they promise? This paper argues that existing results in the literature are upward biased because of measurement...

What is a “worker-centered” trade policy? The Biden administration claims that it means protecting all workers—foreign and American—from exploitative working conditions in trade sectors. The administration’s vigorous enforcement of international labor rights suggests a significant...

The success of GATT negotiations in lowering tariff barriers worldwide has shifted attention to the use of domestic policies as a secondary trade barrier, raising the question of how to deal with domestic policies within an international trade agreement. Currently, no theoretical basis exists...

This paper studies the effects of trade policy uncertainty on the extensive and the intensive margins of trade for a sample of 149 exporters at the HS6 digit level. We measure trade policy uncertainty as the gap between binding tariff commitments under trade agreements (multilateral and regional...

A growing share of modern trade policy instruments is shaped by non-tariff barriers (NTBs). Based on a structural gravity equation and the recently updated Global Trade Alert database, we empirically investigate the effect of NTBs on imports. Our analysis reveals that the implementation of NTBs...

Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a general equilibrium...

This chapter surveys research on the demand for protectionism as well as theoretical and empirical work on the (i) electoral mechanisms, the (ii) lobbying institutions, and the (iii) legislative bargaining that affect its supply. A recent trend is mutual feedbacks between commercial policy on...

This article investigates how sectorial characteristics determine the probability of industries receiving an anti-dumping (AD) duty, delving into the economic literature on the political economy of protection, market competition and trade reform in Brazil. By focusing on when the AD was granted,...