With free trade areas (FTAs) undernegotiation between Japan and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) members and between the Republic of Korea and AFTA members, preferential market access will become more important in Asian regionalism. Protectionist pressures will likely increase through rules of...

This paper explores how the elimination of Madagascar's Marketing Board in 1995 affected prices paid to farmers, incentives, and regional indicators of poverty and inequality. After steadily losing market share, Madagascar has been able to regain some of the lost ground since the mid-1990s....

Duty drawback (or rebate) systems, reduce or eliminate the duties paid on imported intermediate goods, or raw materials used in the production of exports. When a firm imports an intermediate product for use in the production of an export good, tariff payments on the imported intermediate good...

The demand for accountability in aid-for-trade is increasing but monitoring has focused on case studies and impressionistic narratives. The paper reviews recent evidence from a wide range of studies, recognizing that a multiplicity of approaches is needed to learn what works and what does not....

At the Davos forum of January 2014, a group of 14 countries pledged to launch negotiations on liberalizing trade in"green goods"(also known as"environmental"goods), focusing on the elimination of tariffs for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation list of 54 products. The paper shows that the Davos...

This paper contributes to the debate on the existence of pollution haven effects by systematically measuring the pollution content of trade (measured by the pollution content of imports, PCI) and decomposing it into three components-a"deep"component (unrelated to the environmental debate but...

In recent years, two classes of computable general equilibrium (CGE) trade models have been used to investigate external sector policies: single country and and multicountry trade models. The authors examine the treatment of exports and imports in recent single country CGE models of small...

In 1981, the United States (U.S.) induced the Japanese to agree to a voluntary export restraint (VER) on their export of autos to the U.S. The countries negotiated the VERagainst a backdrop of falling U.S. production and employment in the auto industry and several legislative attempts to curb...

Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) present a growing threat to a liberal world-trading system and slow the reallocation of production of mature industries from developed to developing countries. Among NTBs, voluntary export restraints (VERs) are proliferating and constitute a major element of the"new...

The"distance effect"measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the"distance puzzle". This paper reviews the evidence and explanations. Using an extensive data set of 124...