In 1901, six Australian states joined together in political and economic union, creating an internal free trade area and adopting a common external tariff. This paper investigates the impact of federation on Australia's internal and international trade flows by studying changes in the "border...

Trade negotiations occur through time and between the governments of many countries. An important issue is thus whether the value of concessions that a government wins in a current negotiation may be eroded in a future bilateral negotiation to which it is not party. In the absence of rules that...

Why have white, less educated voters left the Democratic Party over the past few decades? Scholars have proposed ethnocentrism, social issues and deindustrialization as potential answers. We highlight the role played by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study...

This paper evaluates a possible US-SACU (Southern African Customs Union) free trade agreement as part of a US approach to new preferential trade agreements characterized by the term competitive liberalization.' This is the idea that competition among large countries (US/EU) to negotiate...

In this paper, I examine the impacts of trade and investment liberalization on the wage structure of Mexico. Part one of the paper surveys recent literature on the labor-market consequences of Mexico's economic reforms in the 1980?s. Mexico's policy reforms appear to have raised the demand for...

One of the motivations for NAFTA from the US point of view was to reduce the" incentives for Mexican migration into the US. Unskilled rural males are a primary source of" illegal immigration and also Mexico's relatively abundant factor. This group should therefore" be made better off by trade...

In contrast to existing work which takes an ex-ante approach and looks for policy prescriptions which yield welfare improvements, we take an ex-post approach. We ask whether there are indicators which show whether welfare has risen or not in the wake of a reform. That is, we look for evidence of...

What is the impact on output of movement towards free trade? Can trade liberalization have a permanent effect on output levels, and more importantly, does it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? The model developed here emphasizes the role" that knowledge spillovers emanating from...

In this paper, we derive three lessons from Mexico's experience. First, deep reforms like trade liberalization are not likely to happen by government decree. Instead, they usually come about when the unanimous blocking of reform by powerful elites breaks down. In the case of Mexico, this...

A free trade agreement supports global free trade since trade barriers tend to divert trade in favor of members, but not reduce imports. The term: 'mutual assured deterrence' is used to refer to a regional free trade association that has the feature that no member can gain individually from the...