Poor countries are rarely challenged in formal World Trade Organization (WTO) trade disputes for failing to live up to commitments, reducing the benefits of their participation in international trade agreements. This article examines the political-economic causes of the failure to challenge poor...

This research estimates the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1-2010:Q4 for the United States, European Union, and three other industrialized economies. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample provide evidence of three key relationships for...

Do exports resume when import-restricting temporary trade barriers such as antidumping are finally removed? To establish the importance of this question for emerging economies, this paper uses newly available data from the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database to update a number of...

While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

This paper estimates the impact of aggregate fluctuations on the time-varying trade policies of 13 major emerging economies over 1989-2010. By 2010, these World Trade Organization member countries collectively accounted for 21 percent of world merchandise imports and 22 percent of world gross...

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,...