The author examines whether trade liberalization should create a greater incentive for countries to invest in transportation infrastructure. He pays special attention to the case of preferential trade liberalization between neighboring countries, where investments in roads or railroads are...

The East African Community has long recognized that regional economic integration can yield significant welfare gains to its member states. To that end, the community has been making steady progress towards the removal of tariffs and quantitative restrictions to trade. Moreover, in recent years,...

As a result of trade reforms in the 1980s and 1990s Latin American and Caribbean countries became more open than at any time since World War II. However, these countries have recently begun to use antidumping measures as the new protection weapon of choice, as other barriers to trade have been...

The theoretical literature on trade follows two different approaches to explaining the endogenous formation of customs unions: 1) The terms-of-trade approach, in which integrating partners are willing to exploit terms-of-trade effects. Using the terms-of-trade approach, one concludes that...

This study investigates trade effects of the regional liberalization of technical barriers to trade (TBTs) in the form of harmonization and mutual recognition agreements (MRAs) for testing procedures. The theoretical part of the paper is framed in terms of a heterogeneous firms approach. This...

In recent years there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of complementary policies in enhancing the benefits of a more open trade regime. This study focuses on the importance of factor market flexibility to trade reforms. Using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model and...

The authors quantify the impact on Cameroon of three aspects of its new regional trade agreement with the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (the CEMAC agreement): i) improved access to markets in CEMAC; ii) preferential tariff reduction; and iii) reduction of its external tariff...

Many countries use duty drawbacks on exports, yet they have been given little attention in the literature and there is no consensus whether countries should embrace or abandon them. The author asserts that the answer depends on a country’s development priorities and economic conditions. An...

There has been a resurgence of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This has led to renewed debate about how PTAs affect both welfare and the multilateral system. The author examines two ideas: the welfare impact of PTAs and the effect of structural and policy changes on PTAs. He asks how the...

Starting in the late 1980s, policy makers and academics began increasingly to call for the development of multilateral discipline on anticompetitive practices. Some believe that falling trade barriers must be complemented by antitrust measures to ensure that foreign competition materializes;...