The authors examine regional cooperation among neighboring countries in the area of regional public goods. These public goods include water basins (such as lakes, rivers, and underground water), infrastructure (such as roads, railways, and dams), energy, and the environment. Their analysis...

Based on static analysis, a number of studies argue that forming a regional trade agreement is more likely to raise welfare if member countries are"natural trading partners,"while other studies claim that the opposite is true. Schiff and Wang look at the argument from a dynamic viewpoint by...

The literature on regional integration agreements (RIAs) is vast and deals with political, economic, and political economy issues. The literature on the economics of RIAs deals mostly with static effects, and concludes that these effects are, in general, ambiguous. So far there has been no...

Forming a regional grouping with neighboring nations may be one way for microstates to overcome a major problem: Because of their weak bargaining power and high fixed costs of negotiation, microstates are at a severe disadvantage in dealing with the rest of the world. They don't have the human...

Labor market integration is typically assumed to improve welfare in the absence of distortions, because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. The author examines this result in a simple general equilibrium model in the presence of a common property resource: social capital....

This paper examines the impact on total factor productivity of North-South and South-South trade-related research and development (R&D) spillovers. It is the first to do so at the industry level for developing countries. North-South and South-South R&D flows are constructed based on...

The authors are particularly interested in evaluating the concern that efficiency or policy-induced changes in the supply of exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee, and tea, may lead to such a large decline in the prices of those commodities that export revenues and incomes of the...

Before 1973, the labor market in Europe was tight and immigration from the South (chiefly North Africa and Southern Europe) was encouraged. But with the slowdown in growth in the mid-1970s, the rise in unemployment, and increased economic uncertainty, immigration came to be viewed as a burden by...

It has been widely argued that, with the decline in trade costs (for example, transport and communication costs), the importance of distance has declined over time. If so, this would be a boon for countries located far from the main centers of economic activity. The authors examine the evolution...

The author combines two theories - one about how multilateral trade liberalization affects regional integration, the other about how it affects political disintegration - to explain why the ratio of free trade areas to customs unions has increased over time. Ethier argues (1998, 1999) that...