Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

We consider a 3 country world in which each country's import market is served by competing exporters from its 2 trading partners. We assume that weak multilateral enforcement mechanisms prevent governments from implementing efficient trade policies through a multilateral agreement requiring...

This paper considers tariff phase-outs in multilateral and preferential agreements. The paper finds that early GATT rounds primarily were over bindings of existing rates and that it was not until the 1962-67 Kennedy Round's 50% reduction in manufactured goods tariffs that time paths of tariff...

We study the implications of customs union formation for multilateral tariff cooperation. We model cooperation in multilateral trade policy as self-enforcing, in that it involves balancing the current gains from deviating unilaterally from an agreed-upon trade policy against the future losses...

A large and growing number of countries participate in multiple preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which increasingly entail broad cooperation over policies extending far beyond trade barriers. I review the traditional and non-traditional motives for PTAs and their empirical determinants as...