Intra-industry trade as a share of total tradebetween Central and Eastern European nations and the European Union (EU) is among the highest of all the EU's bilateral trade flows. The authors break down data on these trade flows into horizontal and vertical components, and investigate the...

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are considering liberalizing, privatizing, and deregulating markets face difficult policy issues. Gradual, piecemeal reform efforts have had limited success. The option of a Euro-Mediterranean Agreement (EMA) offers a new opportunity to...

The authors compare the European Community's"trade fundamentals"prevailing in the 1960s with those applying in Arab countries today. The fundamentals differ significantly-Arab countries trade much less with each other than EC members did, and the importance of such trade in GDP varies greatly....

In this paper, developed as part of the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Sourcebook, the authors examine how to implement trade liberalization as part of a strategy for alleviating poverty in developing countries. They discuss trade policy instruments, institutions, complementary...

Despite recurring rounds of trade liberalization, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT). Complemented by unilateral reforms, many developing countries have not been able to integrate into the world economy....

A major result of the Uruguay Round was the creation of a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The GATS greatly extends coverage of the multilateral trading system, establishing rules and disciplines on policies affecting access to service markets. In this paper, the author asks: what...

A new round of World Trade Organization negotiations on agriculture, services, and perhaps other issues is expected in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include"new trade agenda"items aimed at ensuring thatdomestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against foreign...

"Deep integration"--explicit government actions to reduce the market-segmenting effect of domestic regulatory policies through coordination and cooperation--is becoming a major dimension of some regional integration agreements, led by the European Union. Health and safety regulations,...

Starting in the late 1980s, policy makers and academics began increasingly to call for the development of multilateral discipline on anticompetitive practices. Some believe that falling trade barriers must be complemented by antitrust measures to ensure that foreign competition materializes;...

The authors discuss options that could be considered in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to provide more favorable treatment-so-called special and differential treatment (SDT)-to small and low-income countries. They argue that there is a need both for differentiation across WTO members and for...