This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing 'compliance-vs.-rebalancing' debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. Our main criticism concerns the substance of the entire debate. We find that scholars on both sides of the...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create 'regret'...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...

Risks that are associated with an uncertain trading world have been dealt with using two different techniques in the literature: defensive, or insurance approaches, and preventive, or self-protection approaches. Much of the earlier work was emphasized by security issues but with the end of the...

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

Seit Juni 2013 wird das transatlantische Freihandelsabkommen zwischen der EU und den USA verhandelt. Die Kritiker befürchten einen Abbau bestehender Standards im Umwelt- und Verbraucherschutz und bei den Arbeitnehmerrechten. Die Befürworter rechnen mit großen Wohlfahrtsgewinnen für beide...

During the past several years, the United States has concluded a substantial number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (hereinafter “FTAs”), largely with developing countries. Each of those FTAs includes substantial commitments in the field of intellectual property rights (IPRs)...

This paper shows how distance may be used to coordinate on a unique equilibrium in which trade agreements are regional. Trade agreement formation is modeled as coalition formation. In a standard trade model with no distance between countries, a familiar problem of coordination failure arises...

This Article, originally presented at a symposium, THE WTO AT A CROSSROADS, in 2004 at the Law Faculty of Bar Ilan University in Israel, provides a proposal that responds to the problems posed by the increasing prevalence of regional trade agreements. The Article argues that RTAs have tended to...