This paper uses 68 measures of trade policy and trade liberalization to ask if membership in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is associated with more liberal trade policy. Almost no measures of trade policy are significantly...

We discuss China's stance in the WTO post-accession, noting the many issues with implementation of China's accession terms by 2007. We evaluate how much benefit China can realistically receive from WTO membership given current problems with dumping actions against China and trade restrictions...

East Asian countries have become much more active in utilizing the WTO dispute settlement system to assert their legal rights. The dispute settlement experience so far for these countries has shown strong tendency of domestic governments to defend economic interest of major industries. Their...

We describe recent work on the theory of trade agreements that speaks to the purpose and design of GATT. Our discussion proceeds in three steps. First, we examine the purpose of a trade agreement. In both the traditional economic and the political-economy approaches to the study of trade...

This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. We document eight stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations. We use detailed product-level offer and counteroffer data to examine several questions about...

This paper discusses both the potential contribution that trade policy initiatives can make towards the achievement of significant global carbon emissions reduction and the potential impacts of proposals now circulating for carbon reduction motivated geographical trade arrangements, including...

This paper reviews the history of bilateral trade negotiations between Taiwan and the U.S. The question posed at the outset is: does bilateralism enhance or jeopardize multilateralism? The U.S.-Taiwan experience seems to suggest a grossly negative answer. Bilateral negotiations for market...

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...

This paper presents a new model of the domino effect which is used to generate an empirical index of how "contagious" FTAs are with respect to third nations. We test our contagion hypothesis together with alternative specifications of interdependence and other political, economical and...

This paper assesses the effects of reducing tariffs under the Doha Round on market access for developing countries. It shows that for many developing countries, actual preferential access is less generous than it appears because of low product coverage or complex rules of origin. Thus lowering...