Showing 1 - 10 of 1,287
This paper reviews the literature on governments' motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the paper focuses on the purpose of multilateral...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456604
This paper explores whether one of the most important U.S. policies towards Africa of the past few decades achieved its … desired result. In 2000, the United States dropped trade restrictions on a broad list of products through the African Growth … chosen to not include "import-sensitive" products, and despite the general challenges of transaction costs in African …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465432
and non-discrimination, the two principles that are the pillars of the multi- lateral trading system as embodied in GATT and its successor, the WTO. We show that GATT's principle of reciprocity serves to neutralize the world-price effects of a country's trade policy decisions, and hence can...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472892
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457364
This paper reviews recent developments in international trade to evaluate several arguments concerning the merits of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and their place in the world trade system. Taking a multilateralist perspective, it makes several points: First, despite the proliferation of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460818
A large and growing number of countries participate in multiple preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which increasingly entail broad cooperation over policies extending far beyond trade barriers. I review the traditional and non-traditional motives for PTAs and their empirical determinants as...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456537
This paper investigates the theory and evidence that history plays a role in shaping the direction of international trade. Because there are reasons to anticipate a positive correlation between the predominant direction of trade flows in the past and membership in preferential arrangements in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012473283
The last decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of regional trade agreements (RTAs). There seems to be a general if ill-defined belief on the part of many policy-makers, and among a number of academics as well, that there is more to a RTA than the traditional gains from trade. This...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472851
This paper considers the impact on trade of preferential arrangements in Europe since the 1950s. Using a first difference version of the gravity model, we find that the EC and EFTA altered the pattern of international trade. We also find evidence of trade diversion in several cases, notably that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012473587
We consider the purpose and design of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, GATT. We review recent developments in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. And we describe the GATT/WTO architecture and briefly trace its historical antecedents. We suggest that the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463204