This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

This paper proposes a unique overview of trade policies trends since the launch of the Doha Round, based on detailed data on tariffs and trade covering 130 countries. We show that regionalism has delivered limited effective liberalization so far, leading to only a 0.3 percentage point (p.p.) cut...

We examine the relationship between trade balance and net export with both, the official and real effective exchange rates on the J-Curve hypothesis and find evidence to support in favor of the hypothesis, coming from a panel data of 49 developing countries from Africa. Countries can improve...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) - a system of differential and favorable trade arrangements toward less developed countries - has been around since the early 1970s. A primary objective of GSP schemes, sponsored by developed industrialized countries, especially by the United States...

The paper reviews the evidence of the impact of trade liberalisation on the economic performance of poor developing countries with respect to poverty reduction, the distribution of income within countries, the distribution of income between countries, trade and the balance of payments, and...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and...

The purpose of this paper is to update the information on net food importing countries, using different definitions of food, separating countries by their level of income, whether they are in conflict and whether they are significant oil exporters. The study also estimates the changes in net...

We examine the impact of two important non-tariff measures presumed to simultaneously affect firms’ decisions to export to the European Union (EU). As a novelty to the literature, we analyse the impacts of EU pesticide standards on African exports alongside a complementary non-tariff measure...

How shifts in the economic leadership between countries can occur has been widely debated not only since the recent catch up of China in several sectors. However, there is no adequate theoretical model analyzing this question in the light of trade liberalization. This paper is the first one to...