Using provisions to ease the movement of business visitors in trade agreements, we show that removing barriers to the movement of business people promotes trade. We document the increasing complexity of Free Trade Agreements and develop an algorithm that combines machine learning and text...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that trade can act as an engine of growth using panel data for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional integration agreement (RIA) organization, the central objective of whose formation was the need to accelerate, foster, and...

Based on static analysis, a number of studies argue that forming a RTA is more likely to raise welfare if member countries are natural trading partners,ʺ while other studies claim the opposite. This paper considers the argument from a dynamic viewpoint by examining the impact of trade with...

Since the early 1990s, some developing countries have experienced a coincidence of rising exports - especially those related to global value chains - and improved labor market outcomes. During 2000-10, rising trade was associated with falling poverty and inequality in many developing countries....

This study examines the effect of NAFTA, an instance of North-South trade liberalization, on returns to skill in Mexico. Mexico is abundant in low-skill workers relative to the US and Canada, and so, by the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade model, NAFTA ought to have raised the relative earnings of...

Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution increases the political viability of free trade in the US. We do so by assessing the...

We develop a new general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms, variable demand elasticities and endogenously determined wages. Trade integration favors wage convergence, intensifies competition, and forces the least efficient firms to leave the market, thereby affecting aggregate...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...