Current trade policies of European Union and United States stresses establishing free trade arrangements (FTAs) with partners all over the world with special emphasis to developing countries. Besides geo-political aspects, the most important motivation include improvement in foreign market...

This paper contributes to the literature on firms’ productivity and exporting decisions by analysing the role played by organizational choice aspects. Rather than setting up a vertically integrated structure, manufacturers may act as subcontractors in both domestic and foreign markets, and...

South-South trade agreements are proliferating: Developing countries signed 70 new agreements between 1990 and 2003. Yet the impact of these agreements is largely unknown, as existing North- North and North-South micro-level studies are likely to yield misleading predictions for South-South...

This paper analyses the relationship between firm productivity and export behavior in German manufacturing firms. We examine whether productivity increases the probability of exporting, and assert that there is a causal relationship from high productivity to entering foreign markets, as...

The notion of solution plays a crucial role in the conceptual system of Léon Walras, the founder of General Equilibrium Theory (GET). In this paper, after introducing the two solution concepts employed by Walras in the development of his version of GET, respectively called the “theoretical”...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

Skilled labor earnings differentials decreased during the trade liberalization implemented in Brazil from 1988 to 1995. This paper investigates the role of trade liberalization in explaining these relative earnings movements. We perform several independent empirical exercises that check the...

The Grossman and Helpman (1994) model explains tariffs as the outcome of a lobbying game between special interests and the government. Most empirical implementations of this framework use instead non-tariff barriers to measure the extent of protection. Importantly, while the former set of...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the `protection for sale\' model to allow for di®erent...