COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) aims at the establishment of a currency union in 2025. To this purpose, a policy harmonization program and a set of convergence criteria have been set up. A number of projects to foster trade, economic and financial integration have also...

This contribution will focus on the legal system of the United States and will consider the recent bias of the U.S. Congress toward according a non-self-executing character to RIMs to which the United States has become party. It will also consider the theoretical case for according a...

As a result of the emergence of the G20 as the self‐appointed “premier forum for international economic cooperation”, Asia’s expanded participation in G‐summitry has attracted considerable attention. As original G7 member Japan is joined by Australia, China, Indonesia, India and South...

This paper presents one channel through which the creation of a Preferential Trading Arrangement (PTA) can undermine multilateral trade liberalization. Using a modified Meade model, it is shown how a PTA shrinks the export sectors in the excluded countries. This in turn leads to an expansion of...

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...

This timely book examines international trade and investment law at various levels of governance, including unilateral, bilateral, regional, and multilateral arrangements. The author demonstrates that the nature of international trade law is fragmented and cyclical. Whilst not always...

This paper examines the impact of the emergence of regional blocs (customs unions) on the patterns of inter-bloc and intra-bloc trade when firms have the option to engage in direct investment (FDI). The consequences of bloc formation for exogenously given external tariffs is examined first. When...