Trade costs associated with institutional failures and political risks, continue to serve as a big barrier to regional and international trade. Despite this strong impediment, limited work has been done to investigate the effect of weak institutions and type of political regime on bilateral...

The aim of this paper is to explore the political dimensions of investment arbitration. What drives the structures and rules of this institution of private-transnational dispute settlement? To define political dimensions and develop the basis of a political explanation of investment arbitration,...

PTAs are generally negotiated without any tariff concessions or transfers to non-member countries. Can such a PTA benefit the neighbors’ welfare? In a two-good competitive equilibrium model in the absence of an entrepôt, a PTA without concessions to the outside will hurt the outsider’s...

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 objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and...

We study the procompetitive effects of trade policies against a foreign oligopoly in a model of vertical product differentiation. We show that a uniform tariff policy like the Most Favored Nation (MFN) clause is always welfare superior to free trade because of a pure rent-extraction effect....

This paper argues that the formation of regional integration frameworks can be best understood as a dominant state's attempt to create a preferred regional framework in which it can exercise exclusive influence. In this context, it is important to observe not only which countries are included in...

Are trade facilitation measures under free trade agreements (FTAs) discriminatory? This important question has yet to be sufficiently explored by the existing literature on trade facilitation. Despite the multilateral scope and non-discriminatory objectives of trade facilitation measures, some...

This paper provides practical techniques to policymakers for evaluating the potential economic effects of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). To this end, the paper discusses how to apply three methods: (i) trade indicators, (ii) SMART (Software for Market Analysis and Restrictions on Trade) in WITS...

Much potential for trade liberalization exists in industries and markets with trade barriers that are prohibitive for all or many firms. In standard political economic theories of trade policy, observed prohibitive barriers must be globally optimal according to static government preferences,...