Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

Krishna (1998) shows that a bilateral agreement between two countries render a multilateral agreement less attractive if the bilateral agreement is trade diverting. This paper combines Krishna’s model with the empirical approach of Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) to show that the estimated...

The Americas have been a key driver of regional trade agreements (RTAs) since the 1990s. This study considers the effect of these agreements on trade liberalization, and the lessons that this offers for other parts of the world, notably Asia. It finds broad geographical coverage of RTAs in the...