Several of the recently negotiated regional trade agreements (Canada-U.S., NAFTA, E.C.-Hungary/Poland/Czeck and Slovak Republics) contain significantly fewer concessions by the large countries to smaller countries than vice versa. Yet, it is small countries that have sought them and see...

A large and growing number of countries participate in multiple preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which increasingly entail broad cooperation over policies extending far beyond trade barriers. I review the traditional and non-traditional motives for PTAs and their empirical determinants as...

This paper focuses on the effects of rules of origin in Free Trade Areas. We first point out that even rules of origin which are not restrictive, namely those which do not raise costs of production, have very pronounced effects on trade and investment flows. We then look at some different ways...

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and...

This paper reviews the literature on governments' motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the paper focuses on the purpose of multilateral...

We analyze whether preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect the incidence and pattern of antidumping (AD) filings. We estimate AD provisions in PTAs have decreased the incidence of intra-PTA AD cases by 33-55% and have increased the number of AD actions against non-PTA members by 10-30%. The...

What is the impact on output of movement towards free trade? Can trade liberalization have a permanent effect on output levels, and more importantly, does it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? The model developed here emphasizes the role" that knowledge spillovers emanating from...