Building upon earlier work by Willenbockel (2013; MPRA Paper No.51501), this study provides an extended ex-ante computable general equilibrium (CGE) assessment of the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement between the member states of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African...

The paper reviews and compare a selection of existing and new alternative indicators of Revealed Comparative Advantages, with a special emphasis on trade in intermediate products. The research adopts a statistical approach for both its theoretical and its analytical facets. The formal concepts...

In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (1994) and Broda and Weinstein (2006) to estimate the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using Eurostat data from the period of 1999 to 2008. Our results show that newer and smaller member states...

With the seminal work of Feenstra (1994) and its application to the United States by Broda and Weinstein (2006) the gains from variety through trade as suggested by Krugman (1979) have become quantifiable. My paper adds to this literature in different respects: On the theoretical side, the...

There is considerable debate whether the domestic political institutions (specifically, the country’s level of democracy) of the host developing country toward foreign investors are effective in establishing the credibility of commitments are still underway, researchers have also analyzed the...

The failure to advance the multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a disruption for the international trading system. Alternatively, many countries have commenced to establish bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements (FTA). Among those agreements the...

The spaghetti bowl phenomenon expected from the proliferating East Asian regional trade agreements (RTAs) is worrisome. In particular, the complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO). As an...

This paper compares stable Nash equilibria of two games of trade liberalization. In the FTA game, each country can form an FTA with either one of its trade partners, or both of them, or none of them. By contrast, in the No FTA game, each country must choose either no agreement or free trade....

We develop an equilibrium theory of trade agreements in which both the degree and the nature (bilateral or multilateral) of trade liberalization are endogenously determined. To determine whether and how bilateralism matters, we also analyze a scenario where countries pursue trade liberalization...

In a three country model with endogenous tariffs, this paper evaluates and contrasts the welfare effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) — the two most commonly occurring preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We show that if the external tariff of a PTA is not too...