Existing theories of trade agreements suggest that GATT/WTO efforts to reign in export subsidies represent an inefficient victory for exporting governments that comes at the expense of importing governments.Building from the Cournot delocation model first introduced by Venables (1985), we...

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...

We present a framework for understanding and interpreting reciprocity and nondiscrimination, the two principles that are the pillars of the multilateral trading system as embodied in GATT and its successor, the WTO. We show that GATT’s principle of reciprocity serves to neutralize the...

Despite the important role played by GATT in the world economy, economists have not developed a unified theoretical framework that interprets and evaluates the principles that form the foundation of GATT. Our purpose here is to propose such a framework. Working within a general equilibrium trade...

We explore the impact of the formation of regional free trade agreements on the ability of countries to maintain low cooperative multilateral tariffs. We assume that countries can not make binding international commitments, but are instead limited to self-enforcing arrangements. Specifically, we...