How high were import tariffs when GATT participants began negotiations to reduce them in 1947? Establishing this starting point is key to determining how successful the GATT has been in bringing down trade barriers. If the average tariff level was about 40 percent, as commonly reported, the...

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading...

Suppose that when addressing the question of ?what?s left for the WTO?,? tariff negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and...

This paper introduces a new data set and establishes a set of basic facts and patterns regarding the trade that countries fight about under World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement. The paper characterizes the scope of products, as well as the levels of and changes to the trade values,...

Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and...

Use of temporary trade barriers has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. This paper constructs a panel of bilateral, product-level United States steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...

While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

This paper examines the evolving, cross-country use of antidumping, safeguard, and countervailing duty policies -- temporary trade barriers (TTBs) -- over the period 1990-2009. The author constructs two new measures of imported products subject to the combined use of these TTBs before applying...