For Africa, a regional customs union is unlikely to realise net welfare gains (in the sense of trade creation dominating trade diversion) which cannot be attained through unilateral trade liberalization. Unilateral reform has often failed in Africa, however. A regional customs union tied to...

The international financial system has been the subject of much debate following the financial crises of the 1990s. While many reforms have been proposed for and implemented by mostly developing countries, few changes have been made to the international financial system itself. Fundamentally,...

Given the sluggish progress in multilateral trade negotiations Southern and Eastern African negotiators are likely to focus their attention on the negotiations of Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union. This paper analyses possible advantages and disadvantages for ACP countries...

It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is...

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...

Almost all the literature on tax competition in the presence of multinationals (MNCs) and profit shifting ignores trade costs. This Paper studies how economic integration, in terms of reduced trade costs and internationalization of ownership, affects tax competition and equilibrium corporate...

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...

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,...