This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade for free trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practice. Second, free trade areas generally involve...

"Silva investigates the role played by domestic importers and foreign exporters in improving preferential access to the domestic market. To this end, the framework he uses extends the protection for sale analysis to explicitly model the role of domestic importers and foreign exporters in...