Rules of origin arrangements under the Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (CER) were referred to the Commission for examination and report by May 2004. The request stemmed from concerns that Australian and New Zealand firms were having difficulty achieving the...

Within any preferential trade agreement (PTA) origin rules exist in order to prevent third countries from taking advantage of the PTA concessions. The rules thus are there to preserve the existing external protection of countries within the PTA. However, depending on their formulation, they can...

A key element of the EU’s free trade and preferential trade agreements is the extent to which they deliver improved market access and so contribute to the EUs foreign policy objectives towards developing countries and neighbouring countries in Europe, including the countries of the Balkans....

In a vertically differentiated market with cost asymmetries, the risk dominance criterion selects the equilibrium where the high quality is produced by the efficient firm. We show that a sufficiently high Minimum Quality Standard reverses equilibrium selection. Hence, MQS may be used in order to...

Theoretical analyses of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism suggest that the system contains only weak incentives for the implementation of rulings. Against this background, it is puzzling that the specific WTO procedure which deals with allegedly insufficient implementation is used only in...

Thanks to Nitsan Chorev, Robert Connolly, David Leblang, Quan Li, Andy Mertha, Layna Mosley, Bumba Mukherjee, Eric Reinhardt, Peter Rosendorff, Matthew Slaughter, Andy Sobel, participants of the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting and the 2004 Duke Summer Institute on...

Small economies rarely embrace free trade, a fact that is commonly explained as a consequence of the government's use of trade policy to redistribute income. But why is this redistribution typically biased in favor of import-competing sectors and is consequently trade restricting rather than...