Free trade agreements (FTAs) have proliferated in East Asia in recent years. As of December 2008, eight bilateral FTAs and one plurilateral FTA involving Japan have entered into force; additional negotiations are ongoing with several more countries. The proliferation of FTAs in Japan and other...

How did post-War newer democracies, whose governments faced both pressures from vested special interests and voters, achieve trade liberalization ? Exploiting the case of trade liberalization in 1960s Japan, this paper addresses this question. Because the benefits and costs of trade...

In this paper we argue that strong political economy forces explain the rush of the EU to expand eastwards. We use a model of vertical product differentiation in order to claim that technologically- advanced EU firms (residing in high-income member countries) prefer a mutual market-opening with...

We study the welfare implications of a bilateral free trade agreement. The model is based on the recent trade literature that considers search and matching frictions in the labor market. We extend the model by incorporating country-level heterogeneity in terms of production technology,...

EU-Japan free trade agreement negotiations have made promising progress in the shadow of highly scrutinized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Transpacific Partnership (TPP) talks. EU trade policy, it appears, has only been partially and selectively politicized "in favor"...

In this paper we argue that strong political economy forces explain the rush of the EU to expand eastwards. We use a model of vertical product differentiation in order to claim that technologically-advanced EU firms (residing in high-income member countries) prefer a mutual market-opening with...

This paper examines the impacts of the Japan-Mexico EPA on bilateral trade by using two different types of information, trade statistics and the EPA utilization rate. Using trade data, we found that Japan’s exports of built-up cars, auto parts, base metals, electrical machinery, precision...

Recent research in international political economy has begun to explore the implications of producer heterogeneity for trade politics. Variations in productivity and size lead to systematic variations in both market and political behaviors. These similarly lead to systematic variations in policy...