The severity of binding constraints to trade expansion in developing countries and the importance of the complementary policies that will maximize the impact of trade reforms on trade and economic growth are identified and quantified in this report. As trade-related needs of developing countries...

Latin America will support the FTAA if it sees this project as a way of creating the conditions for improved growth performance and declining poverty. In searching for these objectives with effectiveness, this paper calls attention to some of the conditions that are necessary in order for...

The outcome of the Uruguay Round show that the concessions given by developing countries were more valuable than those they received from industrial countries. I suggest that this outcome is explained by the aggresive demands from industrial countries and the lack of resources (human and...

After decades of being a marginal player in the GATT trade negotiations, Argentina decided to participate actively in the Uruguay Round. This chapter measures the imbalance between the concessions given and received and concludes that the value of the first are far more important than the...

In this paper, we examine the influence of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on Chilean exports during the past thirty years. Over the last three decades, Chile has entered into 31 FTAs with 65 countries, encompassing nearly 90% of global GDP. Despite this, there's a notable absence of empirical...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

The basic principles of a free society are timeless, but they need to be relearned every generation. One of those principles is the freedom for people to trade freely with one another — both within nations and across borders. The case in favor of free trade has been uncontroversial among...

The vast majority of the books and articles that have been written over the past few centuries about trade policy in general and protectionism in particular have been written from a utilitarian perspective. Indeed, it would only be a slight overstatement to say that the only works written about...