This paper explores a world in which regional trade agreements help reduce security tensions between neighbors.Regional integration agreements (RIAs) are examples of second best and have an ambiguous impact on welfare, contend Schiff and Winters.They build a model in which RIAs unambiguously...

Regional integration agreements are examples of second-best policies and have an ambiguous impact on welfare. This article builds a model in which regional integration agreements unambiguously raise welfare by correcting for externalities. It assumes that trade between neighboring countries...

Democratic countries with substantial inequality and where people believe that success depends on connections and luck induce political support for high tax rates and generous welfare states. Traditional wisdom is that such policies harm the economy, but there is not much evidence that countries...

We study the optimal trade policy against a foreign oligopoly withendogenous quality. We show that, under the Most Favoured Nation(MFN) clause, a uniform tariff policy is always welfare improvingover the free trade equilibrium. However, a nonuniform tariff policyis always desirable on welfare...