Despite the well known gains from trade, trade liberalization is one of the most politically contentious actions that a government can undertake. We propose and formalize a new explanation of this unpopularity. The explanation is based on uncertainty and is complementary to the usual...

In this paper we provide a quantitative examination of initiatives for post-Uruguay Round liberalization in ‘traditional’ GATT/WTO market access areas, as a counterpoint to the recent policy literature on newer issues such as the environment, competition policy, and labour standards. We...

We assess some likely consequences of commercial policy in an intertemporal CGE model of an imperfectly competitive, small open economy. Specifically, we combine an overlapping generations model of aggregate savings with capital accumulation by forward-looking investors and production under...

We examine the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We calibrate our model to the pre-trade liberalization stage, simulate the trade liberalization, and compute the...

When trade costs are of the iceberg type (Samuelson 1952) and markups are independent of trade costs, relative prices across markets are distorted, but relative prices within markets are not. When trade costs depart from the analytically convenient iceberg type, distortion will also occur within...

The radical liberalization of foreign trade in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 has been a key part of the economic reform and has been accompanied by a full-scale geographical reorientation of international trade from East to West. Increased trade with the EU has been associated with...

This paper discusses the potential role of a Euro-Mediterranean Agreement (EMA) in helping Middle East and North African governments implement structural economic reforms. The arguments for and against preferential liberalization are summarized, identifying a number of necessary conditions for...

In a two-country reciprocal-dumping model, with one country unionized, we analyse how wage setting and firm location are influenced by trade liberalization. We show that trade liberalization can induce a unionized firm to move all production abroad. This cannot prevail in a corresponding,...

Protection unconstrained by rules typically varies considerably over time. The policy disciplines introduced in the Uruguay Round in `new' areas such as agricultural, services, and developing country industrial protection will constrain, but not eliminate, this variability. The effects of these...

This Paper presents a survey of the literature on trade liberalization and globalization. The questions are why trade liberalization occurred, why trade liberalization took the form of reciprocity combined with multilateralism, why the liberalization allows for protectionist policies, and why...