Suppose that when addressing the question of “what’s left for the WTO?,” tariff negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

High levels of protection and domestic support for farmers in industrial countries significantly affect many developing countries, both directly and through the price-depressing effect of agricultural support policies. High tariffs--in both rich and poor countries--and domestic support may also...

That free trade allows economies in an ideal world to achieve the greatest possible welfare is one of the few undisputed propositions in economics. In reality, however, free trade is rare. The author argues that many developing countries intervene in trade at least partly to raise revenues, and...

Addressing climate change requires the deployment of green technologies. Using novel transaction-level import data from firms in 35 emerging markets in a firm-level structural gravity model, this paper examines the trade policy determinants of firms' imports of products associated with green...

This paper assesses issues relating to tariffs and nontariff measures (NTMs) in relation to Russia's World Trade Organization (WTO) and Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) commitments. The analysis finds that full implementation of Russia's WTO tariff schedule through 2020, would raise goods imports by...

This paper views tariff-cutting formulas as a potential solution to the free-rider problem that arises when market opening is negotiated bilaterally and extended on a most-favored-nation basis. The negotiators in the Doha Agenda chose formulas that are ideal from an economic efficiency viewpoint...

The relationships between trade facilitation, trade flows, and capacity building are complex and challenging to assess, both empirically and in implementation. The authors measure and estimate the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows across 75 countries in global trade,...

This paper surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83 percent of the world's population and 91 percent of the world's GDP in 2013. It addresses the following five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading...

How do global supply chain linkages modify countries' incentives to impose import protection? Are these linkages empirically important determinants of trade policy? To address these questions, this paper introduces supply chain linkages into a workhorse terms-of-trade model of trade policy with...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...