In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...

The proliferation of RTAs is a central feature of the world trade policy environment in the last 20 years. This paper provides an empirical study of the extent to which the formation of RTAs has changed the distribution of world goods trade among trading partners. To do this, it constructs a new...

This chapter explores how the former (GATT) and current (WTO) multilateral trading system have been handling the rules on RTAs over time and with the change of the multilateral liberalization agendas, and how the monitoring and evaluation set by those rules have been working. The chapter is...