We provide a first formal analysis of the international rules that govern the use of subsidies to domestic production. Our analysis highlights the impact of the new disciplines on subsidies that were added to GATT rules with the creation of the WTO. Our results suggest that, although GATT...

We consider the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: (i) negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; (ii) governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the...

It has been almost two years since the process leading to the reform of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) was initiated. The Ministerial Conference in Doha provided the legal mandate to do so. Negotiations started in early March 2002 and were supposed to be concluded by end of May 2003....

Motivated by the structure of WTO negotiations, we analyze a bargaining environment in which negotiations proceed bilaterally and sequentially under the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle. We identify backward-stealing and forward-manipulation problems that arise when governments bargain under...

A major accomplishment of the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations in creating the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the introduction of new dispute settlement procedures. These procedures were intended to provide a significant step forward, relative to GATT, in the settling of trade disputes, in...

Trade negotiations occur through time and between the governments of many countries. An important issue is thus whether the value of concessions that a government wins in a current negotiation may be eroded in a future bilateral negotiation to which it is not party. We identify rules of...

In this paper, we present research that speaks to the purpose and design of GATT. The paper proceeds in three basic steps. We first discuss the major theoretical approaches to the study of trade agreements. Next, we develop the institutional context for our study with a description of the...

What do trade negotiators negotiate about? There are two distinct theoretical approaches in the economics literature that offer an answer to this question: the terms-of-trade theory and the commitment theory. The terms of-trade theory holds that trade agreements are useful to governments as a...