There is not yet consensus in the trade agreements literature as to whether preferential liberalization leads to more or less multilateral liberalization. However, research thus far has focused mostly on tariff measures of import protection. This paper develops more comprehensive measures of...

How high were import tariffs when GATT participants began negotiations to reduce them in 1947? Establishing this starting point is key to determining how successful the GATT has been in bringing down trade barriers. If the average tariff level was about 40 percent, as commonly reported, the...

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading...

How do global supply chain linkages modify countries' incentives to impose import protection? Are these linkages empirically important determinants of trade policy? To address these questions, this paper introduces supply chain linkages into a workhorse terms-of-trade model of trade policy with...

Suppose that when addressing the question of “what’s left for the WTO?,” tariff negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and...

Critical appraisals of the current and potential benefits from developing country engagement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) focus mainly on the Doha Round of negotiations. This paper examines developing country participation in the WTO dispute settlement system to enforce foreign market...

This paper examines the evolving, cross-country use of antidumping, safeguard, and countervailing duty policies -- temporary trade barriers (TTBs) -- over the period 1990-2009. The author constructs two new measures of imported products subject to the combined use of these TTBs before applying...

This paper introduces a new data set and establishes a set of basic facts and patterns regarding the trade that countries fight about under World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement. The paper characterizes the scope of products, as well as the levels of and changes to the trade values,...

Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and...