Existing theories of trade agreements suggest that GATT/WTO efforts to reign in export subsidies represent an inefficient victory for exporting governments that comes at the expense of importing governments.Building from the Cournot delocation model first introduced by Venables (1985), we...

We consider the purpose and design of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, GATT. We review recent developments in the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. And we describe the GATT/WTO architecture and briefly trace its historical antecedents. We suggest that the...

In this paper I sketch out the rough contours of the challenge faced by the WTO in dealing with non-tariff measures (NTMs) as seen from the economic theories of trade agreements. The key questions for the WTO - the answers to which largely dictate the choice between shallow and deep approaches...

We explore the impact of the formation of regional free trade agreements on the ability of countries to maintain low cooperative multilateral tariffs. We assume that countries can not make binding international commitments, but are instead limited to self-enforcing arrangements. Specifically, we...

We study the implications of customs union formation for multilperation. We model copperation in multilateral trade policy as self-enforcing, in that it involves balancing the current gains from deviating unilaterally from an agreed-upon trade policy against the future losses from forfeiting the...