Assessing the Impact of Trade Liberalization : The Case of Jordan

The paper assesses the impact of Jordan’s substantial trade liberalisation over the last two decades. Using a gravity model, a large country sample and a long time-series, we estimate the effects of various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and the WTO accession on both Jordan’s exports and imports. Overall, we find that the impact has been rather small, as no statistically significant impact on exports and imports can be found due to multilateral or preferential trade liberalisation. However, there are three exceptions: The FTA with the United States of America has boosted Jordan’s exports, whereas both the FTA with other Arab countries (GAFTA) and the WTO accession have led to an increase in imports