This paper investigates whether preferential trade agreements (PTA) promote exports to third nations through the expansion of the extensive margin (i.e. larger number of export goods). The analysis covers 11 South- South and South-North PTAs involving 36 countries that exported to 118 different...

The proliferation of preferential trade agreements has resulted in a complex system of preferences in which market access conditions are often discriminatory. In this paper we investigate how market access conditions have evolved between 2000 and 2009, and how this has affected international...

One consequence of the proliferation of preferential trade agreements is that an increasing share of international trade is not subject to most favored nation tariffs, but rather enters markets through preferential access. The objective of this paper is to better investigate to what extent...

The paper investigates how Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) affect the range of goods exported by a nation. We use the Melitz model and highly dis-aggregated data on Euro-Mediterranean trade to measure the effect of preferential trade liberalization on the range of traded products. By...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of race-to-the-bottom unilateralism. It suggests that decades of unilateral tariff cutting in Asia?s emerging economies have been driven by a competition to attract FDI from Japan. Using spatial econometrics, I show that tariffs on parts and...