In this chapter, I review the literature on governments’ motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the chapter focuses on the purpose of...

This paper looks at the possibilities of a concluding "Bali package" on the issues that are currently engaging the WTO Members. It gives an account of the discussions currently taking place on each of the three areas and makes an assessment whether it is possible for the key countries to arrive...

To date, government procurement has been effectively carved out of the main multilateral rules of the WTO system. This paper examines the systemic and other ramifications of this exclusion, from both an economic and a legal point of view. In addition to relevant elements of the WTO Agreements,...

As East Asia becomes increasingly integrated through market-driven trade and FDI activities, free trade agreements (FTAs) are proliferating. Consolidation of multiple and overlapping FTAs into a single East Asian FTA can help mitigate the harmful noodle bowl effects of different or competing...

The preferential trade agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and Iran on mutual trade entered into force in October 2019. In this report we estimate its expected impact at aggregate and sectoral levels using the gravity model of trade based on the global sample of bilateral trade...

We study the welfare impact of rules of origin in free trade agreements where final-good producers source customized inputs from suppliers within the trading bloc. We employ a property-rights framework that features hold-up problems in suppliers' decisions to invest, and where underinvestment is...

We study how a preferential trade agreement (PTA) affects international sourcing decisions, aggregate productivity and welfare under incomplete contracting and endogenous matching. Contract incompleteness implies underinvestment. That inefficiency is mitigated by a PTA, because the agreement...

We study, theoretically and empirically, how countries choose intra-bloc tariffs and preferential margins when they form Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Our model indicates that countries should set systematically lower preferential margins when the bloc takes the form of a free trade area...

We nest an extended two-way fixed effect (ETWFE) estimator for staggered difference-in-differences within the structural gravity model. To test the ETWFE, we estimate the effects of regional trade agreements (RTAs). The results suggest that RTA estimates in the current gravity literature may be...