The Great Recession of 2008–09 provided a fertile ground for protectionist pressures to increase. It caused a negative shock to the global economy that is comparable with the Great Depression of the 1930s. International trade suffered a historical collapse in 2009, but trade flows quickly...

In March 2013, the EU and Japan launched negotiations for a comprehensive free trade agreement (FTA). The EU also announced starting of similar negotiations with the United States. Japan decided to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership under negotiation among 11 developed and developing nations in...

Worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models. Yet, most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy-wide returns to a specific worker characteristic (i.e. skill or education) rather than through...

New developments and dramatic changes are under way in the world trading system. This paper aims to take stock of the latest and most relevant developments and highlight the prospects for global trade governance. The focus is on three major issues, i.e. : (1) the outcome of the Ninth WTO...

This Paper studies the relationship between trade liberalization and informality. It is often claimed that increased foreign competition in developing countries leads to an expansion of the informal sector, defined as the sector that does not comply with labour market legislation. Using data...

The impact of protection on economic growth is one of the traditional issues in economic history, which has enjoyed a revival in recent times, with the publication of a number of comparative quantitative papers. They all share a common weakness: they measure protection with the ratio of custom...

The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to export elasticities goes back over a century to the writings of Edgeworth (1894) and Bickerdike (1907). Despite the optimal tariff argument's centrality in debates over trade policy, there exists no evidence...