With the globalisation of the world economy, the multiplication of international agreements and the ever expending scope and depth of issues addressed, trade negotiations are representing new challenges from which developing countries are not immune. Besides their own regional integration...

This paper quantifies the extent of preferential trade as a share of total world trade in different regions of the world and for two periods. Results show that: i) preferential trade represented 40% of world trade in the period 1988-1992 and it slightly increased to 42% during the period 1993-1997;...