What influences the adoption of transparency obligations in trade agreements, and what are its effects? This paper uses a new dataset on transparency provisions in over a hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) to provide empirical evidence of the political economy determinants of international...

Countries embarking on trade negotiations are not only seeking increased market access, but also, reduced market opacity. This study distils the most progressive practices for promoting regulatory transparency in over one hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) concluded by OECD and large...

The geographic structure of the Magharib countries necessitates its political and economic partnership. However, there were many hindrances that curtailed further mutual benefits in the past decades. That minimized its economic cooperation in many ways. The emergence of the WTO adds to questions...

The paper explores how international integration through global value chains shapes the working of exchange rates to induce external adjustment both in the short and medium run. The analysis indicates that greater integration into international value chains reduces the exchange rate elasticity...

In Philippines - Distilled Spirits, the Appellate Body of the WTO reaffirmed that the determination of 'likeness' in the GATT should be about the competitive relationship between products. A coherent methodology for the determination of 'likeness' has finally begun to emerge, with the same...

From a macroeconomic perspective, the historical evolution of trade and commerce has been closely entangled in a two-way or paradoxical relationship with the evolution of laws, in which one is inextricably linked to the other and both mutually influence each other. At the microeconomic level,...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

To study the effects of tariffs on gross domestic product (GDP), one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. Kee, Nicita, and Olarreaga modify Kohli's (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for...

This study proposes to evaluate the negative impact of COVID-19 on international trade exchange worldwide. Hence, we offer a new methodology is called the "The Trade Emancipation Evaluation Methodology (TEE-Methodology)." There are four primary phases in the implementation of TEE-Methodology....

While the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement has received far more attention, a lesser-known U.S. trade deal has also been reworked. In April of 2017, President Trump proclaimed his displeasure with the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (commonly referred to as “KORUS”),...