This paper explores the role of financial factors in the 2008-9 collapse of U.S. imports and exports. Using highly disaggregated international trade data, we examine whether the cross-sectoral variation in how much imports or exports fell during this episode can be explained by financial...

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated quarterly and monthly data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall...

In this paper, we trace the jurisprudential history of the applicability of US countervailing duty (CVD) law to non-market economies (NMEs). We describe how, since the United States reversed its long standing policy of not imposing CVDs on NMEs, concurrent application of antidumping (AD) and...

We first provide a brief critique of the utilitarian principle as a guide to fairness in the world trading system. We then turn to the alternative conception of fairness in terms of economic equity, exploring the meaning of its two components: equality of opportunity and distributive justice. We...

The establishment of international labor standards linked to market access within the WTO is among the proposals intended to remedy the gross violations of labor and human rights that accompany international trade and investment. Yet, the WTO Charter and, previously, the GATT are virtually...

This paper explores how far free trade agreements (FTAs) have strengthened or weakened global governance of the trading system. We open with an analysis of the altered political and economic context within which countries have come, in recent years, to assign a new importance to regional and...

Two common views are that a country cannot develop without a strong manufacturing base and that trade restrictions are essential to facilitate the development of that strong manufacturing base and thus spur economic growth. We ask: <ul><li>Does a strong manufacturing share of GDP facilitate economic...</li></ul>

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) aspires to become a state-of-the-art trade agreement linking 12 countries on both sides of the Pacific. In addition to establishing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) among these countries, negotiators are pursuing a long list of other issues, both trade-related and...

This paper uses a partial equilibrium model of two small countries, within a large world economy, implementing reciprocal tariff cuts on each otherÕs exports in a regional trade agreement (RTA) and compares the effects with unilateral most-favored-nation (MFN) tariff cuts. The reciprocal cuts...