This article is immerse in the debate over the determinants of countries income level convergence and states that the productive structure of a country is one of the most important of such determinants. A comparative study is performed, testing the potentiality for structural change, for Uruguay...

Many Works have pointed at Uruguayan productive structure, as one of the main causes of the country’s low long term growth rate. This paper presents a different empirical view of the relationship using recent developments proposed by Hausmann and Hidalgo (2009). Their Method of Reflections...

Given the current context of the European Union (EU), there are pressures to adopt restrictive policies on international trade and immigration. As these policies arise as the response of policy makers to individual’s preferences; this paper analyzes the factors that shape them. The dataset is...

Mechanisms for sharing the common tariff revenue in a customs union have received little attention in the literature (Syropoulus, 2003). Comparative analyses show that in past and current customs unions two main mechanisms are been used: generals rules and common funds. In this paper, a new...

The objective of this document is to describe the experience of MERCOSUR countries with respect to the managment of trade remedy measures (anti-dumping duties, countervaling duties and safeguards). For each member country, the institutional framework of these three mecanisms and its utilization...

A common scenario for international commerce is the existence of restrictions on free trade,even when the majority of economists agree on the benefits of it, whatever the country’s size or whatever the country’s economic development. In contexts where politicians offer different policy...

The paper developed a political economy model about endogenous trade policy along the lines of the well known contribution of Grossman and Helpman (1994). In our case the structure of the economy is standard (neoclassical trade model instead of the specific factor trade model of the original...

The objective of this document is to evaluate MERCOSUR trade policy from two complementary perspectives. In the first case, the effective protection level that results from de chosen tariff structure is determined. In the second case, the protection costs in a set of selected sectors are estimated.

The objective of this document is to identify and quantify the deflections of each one of the MERCOSUR member countries with respect to a common external tariff policy. A detailed description of the mechanisms that generate those deflections in each country is presented.

The MERCOSUR is an imperfect custom union whose Common External Tariff (CET) is lower than the one that each member applied before 1991. From 1990 to 1994 regional trade grew, and the patterns of trade changed. The aim of this paper is to analyze if the countries welfare and productive...