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...

Against the backdrop of the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2017 the authors propose to focus the political agenda on the threats to free trade which emerged by the protectionist views of the Trump government, the imminent weakening of the EU Common...

Sub-Saharan Africa's declining importance in global trade is primarily due to its inability to remain competitive in international markets. If Africa merely retained its 1962-1964 shares for major products its exports would now be 75% ($11 billion) higher. External protection against Africa has...

This research provides review of impose trade remedies (antidumping, countervailing measures, safeguard measures) and conduct relative investigation as well as sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) against certain trade partner by different countries in 1995–2015. This research considers...

The study examines the effect of financial crises on international trade with a gravity approach and a large data set covering almost 70 importing and 200 exporting countries from 1950 to 2009. Thus it is possible to put the "Great Trade Collapse" witnessed during the financial crisis 2008/2009,...

Economic sanctions are a frequent instrument of foreign policy. In a diplomatic conflict, they aim to elicit a change in the policies of foreign governments by damaging their economy. However, sanctions are not costless for the sending economy, where domestic firms involved in business with the...

This paper examines the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on agricultural commodity trade using extensive data. The data cover agricultural exports and imports between the U.S. and NAFTA partners over the extended period of 1989 - 2010. The commodities covered in the analyses...

International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining "border effects" that are arguably related to the ICT revolution...

This paper studies the role of reduced barriers to international trade from two dimensions: (i) the implementation of Free Trade Agreements and (ii) declining "border effects". Our empirical estimates suggest that diminished border effects accounts for the bulk of the increase in international...