Rules of origin (RoO) are legitimate policy instruments to prevent trade deflection in a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) short of a customs union. Yet, when captured by special interest groups, RoO can restrict trade beyond what is needed to prevent trade deflection. By how much do political...

Every major regional trade agreement now has a services dimension. Is trade in services so different that we need to modify the conclusions on preferential agreements reached so far in the realm of goods? This paper examines, first, the implications of unilateral policy choices in a particular...

The heterogeneity of southern African countries offers the region a unique opportunity to exploit agricultural potential and trade opportunities through regional integration. We analyze the implications of such opportunities using a regional general equilibrium model. We find that growth in...

In this paper, we assess whether trade among member countries of a regional trade agreement (intra-regional trade) contributes more to output growth than trade with nonmember countries (extra-regional trade). We use Granger causality tests to evaluate the trade-growth relationship in 13...

Labor mobility is an important issue in quantitative economic analyses due to its possible implications for the sectoral reallocation of factors of production, output response, prices, and wages. This paper investigates the issue of agricultural unskilled labor mobility from both modeling and...

This study extends the gravity model to include a new measure of the trading partners’ location relative to other countries. The proposed measure is close in spirit to the theory of gravity, since it is based on the concept of the world trade center. The measure is statistically significant...

We consider the impact of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI) coming from parent countries outside the PTA. While easier access to a larger market due to a PTA may justify new FDI, preexisting investments may be rationalized as firms concentrate...

This paper explores the growth implications of regional integration. From the theory, it identifies the ‘footprints’ that such growth should leave in the data. It then checks the data on the four poor EU nations for such footprints. Prima facie evidence for Ireland, Portugal and Spain...

Recent research has emphasised the role of trade in productivity growth. The purpose of the present paper is to investigate how regional integration, and the different treatment of member and non-member imports, affects the relation between imports and productivity growth. We focus on the...

This paper empirically assesses the integration of ASEAN with the European Union (EU) from an ASEAN-European Union trade model, and investigates their untapped trade potential. For the observation period of 1996 to 2008, the ASEANEU trade gap between the potential trade and the actual trade...