This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on regional trade agreements may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of interest might hold, rather...

Data from the EEC from 1968-1983 do not support the view that regional trading arrangements necessarily lead to increased endogenous protectionism toward outside countries. This paper applies previous theoretical work by both authors on the theory of endogenous protection and endogenous free...

This paper examines the welfare effects of the formation of a free-trade area (a set of countries that abolish tariffs among member countries but let individual member countries to set external tariffs). If a representative consumer has love-of-variety preferences the welfare function exhibits...

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...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully fledged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

This paper examines the welfare implications of non-discriminatory tariff reforms by a subset of countries, which we term a non-preferential trading club. We show that there exist coordinated tariff reforms, accompanied by appropriate income transfers between these countries, that unambiguously...