Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through...

This Paper focuses on policies facilitating firm adjustment to globalization. We briefly review the effects of trade and investment liberalization on firms, focusing on within- industry effects. We postulate that governments’ role in supporting the process is to: (i) ensure that firms face...

Although the WTO has fulfilled several key tasks it was set up to do – providing periodic reviews of members’ trade policies, resolving disputes, supporting negotiations – with the notable exceptions of the Trade Facilitation and Information Technology agreements, WTO members have not been...

International law, political science and economics scholars are all concerned with analyzing the performance of the WTO as an organization. In this paper we focus on the objectives that these different disciplines attribute to the WTO and how performance is assessed against these objectives. The...

Although the WTO has fulfilled several key tasks it was set up to do – providing periodic reviews of members' trade policies, resolving disputes, supporting negotiations – with the notable exceptions of the Trade Facilitation and Information Technology agreements, WTO members have not been...

This paper first briefly describes the role of the WTO and its history. It then lays out a simple bargaining model of international negotiations, which can be used for understanding the Doha round of talks. This simple framework is used to distil and discuss a number of potential explanations...

The current postcrisis environment—and fragile economic recovery—increases the importance of aid for trade. Global rebalancing and tightened fiscal budgets in the short to medium term also place renewed emphasis on aid effectiveness. This note identifies four options to enhance the...

This paper examines some of the features of rules of origin (RoO) that makes these policy instruments nontariff measures, reflects on the causes of the longstanding deadlock in the WTO on multilateral harmonization of non-preferential RoO, and reviews recent trends in RoO included in recent...

Many agreements to liberalize trade in services tend to be limited in scope. Concerns about possible negative regulatory consequences of services liberalization is one reason for this. In this paper we provide quantitative estimates of the impact of governance quality on the magnitude of the...

This article discusses the deadlock in the WTO on multilateral harmonization of non-preferential rules of origin (RoO) and reviews some of the RoO included in recent preferential trade agreements. We argue that there is a trend towards adoption of similar approaches and that this suggests that...