This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade – what they might look like, what sort of political economy … here to stay; world trade is regulated by a motley assortment of unilateral, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements; 2 …) this motley assortment is not the best way to organise world trade. Moving to global duty-free trade will require a …

continuum of goods to show that trade liberalization causes higher unemployment in countries with comparative advantage in … contradicting evidence in the empirical literature on the impact of trade on unemployment. …

) bilateral trade openness reduces bilateral cultural distance; (ii) the more differentiated the products, the more trade reduces … cultural distance; (iii) trade openness has a lock-in effect on culture. Third, we test the model using an instrumental … bilateral trade openness translates into a 43% standard deviation decrease in bilateral cultural distance. …

. Service trade, however, like goods trade, is subject to strong distance effects, implying that the remote supply of services … remains limited. We investigate this proposition by deriving a gravity-like equation for service trade and estimating it for a … large sample of countries and different categories of service trade. We find that distance costs are high but are declining …

We work with a panel of bilateral trade flows from 1988 to 2002, exploring the influence of infrastructure …, institutional quality, colonial and geographic context, and trade preferences on the pattern of bilateral trade. We are interested … in threshold effects, and so emphasize those cases where bilateral country pairs do not actually trade. We depart from …