Este trabajo estudia el alcance y los potenciales efectos de los Acuerdos de Asociación impulsados por la Unión Europea para institucionalizar sus relaciones con países o grupos de países africanos y latinoamericanos. El contenido de los acuerdos va más allá de los tradicionales aspectos...

The withdrawal of GSP+ concessions granted by the European Union in August 2010 could bring about important implications for Sri Lanka’s apparel industry, which is heavily dependent on the European market for its exports. A particular concern is the lack of an international level-playing...

Cutting trade costs, especially those stemming from non-tariff measures, is a growing priority for policy makers. One way to achieve this is for countries to improve their co-operation on regulatory matters. An avenue open to governments is to include provisions related to international...

Increasing moves away from multilateralism have created a fragmented trade and investment scenario where economies progressively combine the application of restrictive unilateral actions with bilateral and regional preferences. The application of, and exceptions to, the non-discrimination...

What are the potential benefits and costs of issue linkage in international cooperation? How can we interpret the patterns of issue linkage (or lack thereof) that we observe in the real world? I address these questions through a unifying framework that distinguishes between three types of...

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the...

In this chapter, I review 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 chapter focuses on the purpose of...