"Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. Chen and Mattoo find, theoretically and empirically, that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the...

"The objective of this paper is to address the main considerations for China of including financial services in its preferential trade agreements. The paper briefly reviews China's financial liberalization process and the state of its domestic financial system, discusses the main considerations...

"The authors examine the economic case for the South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) Agreement signed on January 6, 2004 by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. They start with a detailed analysis of the preferential trading arrangements in South Asia to look at...

This report is structured in three volumes: competition provisions; environment provisions; and labor mobility provisions. The main messages of this three volumes are as follows: 1) competition laws and policies are increasingly being established at the regional level, as they could be...

"This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade...

"Through its diverse trade preference schemes, the European Union provides different groups of developing countries with different degrees of market access. This paper is the first to demonstrate empirically that such staggered market access induces sizable trade diversion to the detriment of...