We study the implications of customs union formation for multilateral tariff cooperation. We model cooperation in multilateral trade policy as self-enforcing, in that it involves balancing the current gains from deviating unilaterally from an agreed-upon trade policy against the future losses...

Until NAFTA, analyses of preferential trading arrangements began by assuming a customs union with a common external tariff, and the differences between customs unions and free trade agreements (FTAs) have been little analyzed. This paper points to some of the differences between FTAs and customs...

In the 1980s the process of trade liberalization through multilateral negotiation seems to have run aground. In its place there have been a number of bilateral and regional moves toward liberalization. Some have been concerned that these local deals may, by undermining the multilateral process,...

The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new evidence on the impact of trade and currency blocs on trade flows from 1928 1938 that suggests a...

This paper looks empirically into the behavior of multinational firms in international oligopolistic markets with trade balance constraints. I show how a particular form of non-tariff barrier applied at the firm level can lead to an increase in trade flows in the presence of intra-firm strategic...

This paper evaluates a possible US-SACU (Southern African Customs Union) free trade agreement as part of a US approach to new preferential trade agreements characterized by the term competitive liberalization.' This is the idea that competition among large countries (US/EU) to negotiate...

This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on Customs Unions (or other regional trade agreements) may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of...

This paper proposes that Viner's celebrated trade diversion and trade creation terminology for the customs union problem be abandoned. As the alternative is offered a welfare calculus based upon the terms-of-trade and volume-of-trade taxonomy from the theory of tariffs. The paper discusses, by...

Globalization -- the integration of national economies -- has become one of the most widely used buzzwords of the late 20th century. Yet there are remarkably few statistical measures of product-market integration across time, countries, and goods. In this paper we present some new measures of...

This paper provides a summary of what is known about trends in international commodity market integration during the second half of the second millennium. The range of goods which have been traded between continents since the Voyages of Discovery has steadily increased over time, and there has...