The Pan-Arab Free Trade Area, negotiated under auspices of the Arab League, came into force in 1997. Under the agreement all tariffs on goods of Arab origin were to be removed by January 1, 2005. This paper summarizes the results of a firm-level survey in nine countries regarding the...

Nonreciprocal trade preferences and provisions in the GATT/WTO that allow developing countries greater leeway to retain or use protectionist policies are two of the central planks of so-called special and differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries in the multilateral trading system....

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are considering liberalizing, privatizing, and deregulating markets face difficult policy issues. Gradual, piecemeal reform efforts have had limited success. The option of a Euro-Mediterranean Agreement (EMA) offers a new opportunity to...

The countries of the Middle Eastand North Africa (MENA) have lost the geographic advantage they used to have because of their proximity to the European Union at a time when Eastern Europe was effectively closed to open exchange with the West. The Central and Eastern European countries are...

The authors compare the European Community's"trade fundamentals"prevailing in the 1960s with those applying in Arab countries today. The fundamentals differ significantly-Arab countries trade much less with each other than EC members did, and the importance of such trade in GDP varies greatly....

What kind of privatization program is best suited to stimulate enterprise restructuring in former centrally planned economies? One view, expressed by most Western business and political leaders, is that privatization is best pursued case by case, with emphasis on sales to new owners, including...

The collapse in trade and contraction of output that occurred during 2008-09 was comparable to, and in many countries more severe than, the Great Depression of 1930, but did not give rise to the rampant protectionism that followed the Great Crash. Theory suggests several hypotheses for why it...

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO’s valuable role in restraining protectionism in the current downturn. What...

In this paper, developed as part of the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Sourcebook, the authors examine how to implement trade liberalization as part of a strategy for alleviating poverty in developing countries. They discuss trade policy instruments, institutions, complementary...

In the first half of the 1990s exports to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from many Central and Eastern European countries grew rapidly. The authors explore the extent that export growth reflects economic restructuring and changes in trade composition as...