The well-known question whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system (MTS) are strangers, friends, or foes (Bhagwati and Panagariya, 1996) has gained new importance with the widespread proliferation of RTAs in recent years. Based on an extensive data set which...

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 develops three major themes. First, the atmosphere of gloom around the multilateral trading system due to dim prospects of a successful conclusion of the Doha Round notwithstanding, global trade regime remains open and the institution in charge of it, the World Trade Organization, is...

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,...

Many different approaches have developed for the evaluation of non-tariff measures (NTMs) and free trade agreements (FTAs). Moving on from models using simple dummy variables, today a range of databases can capture different aspects of NTMs and FTAs. Some assess the depth of FTAs by extracting...

This is the first paper that analyzes for a global sample how trade agreements that include technology-related provisions impact exports of goods, and how this impact differs depending on the technology content of the goods. It includes estimations of a structural gravity model for a panel of...

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...