The author shows that although some short term factors have contributed to the recent food crisis in developing countries, the crisis is rooted mainly in agricultural support policies of developed countries, liberalization of the agricultural sector by developing countries and contradictions in...

Rules of origin (ROO) have emerged as an area in which consensus is hard to achieve among negotiating countries within an RTA. Disagreements over rules of origin have often deferred the implementation of several trade agreements. One of the reasons for this is because ROO are viewed as those...

All countries would agree to immediate global free trade if countries were compensated for any terms-of-trade losses with transfers from countries whose terms-of-trade improve, and if customs unions were required to have no effects on non-member countries. Global free trade with transfers is in...

Abstract The author argues in this chapter that trade liberalization in Africa during the last couple of decades has led to de-industrialization, slow growth of GDP, low level of investment, growing trade deficits, particularly in food items, in many African countries. This has been the case...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries' growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc, results are typically not judged against models, policies are poorly measured,...

Market access liberalization has influenced product-specific growth of world exports and contributed to the shift in the structure of world exports of manufactures towards electrical and electronic goods (including parts and components), goods that require high R&D expenditures, and...

The paper studies the impact of trade liberalization on competition and productivity. Competition is the main channel through which trade liberalization affects economic performance. Competition fosters innovation and technology adoption which leads to increases in competitiveness and growth...

The United States of America is the top trading partner of the Philippines and also the top destination of highly skilled and professional Filipino workers. This paper explores the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA) that covers the asymmetries of the two countries in labor, services and...

Many new exporters give up exporting very shortly, despite substantial entry costs; others shoot up foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We develop a model based on experimentation to rationalize these and other dynamic patterns of exporting firms. We posit that individual export...