What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

Gravity equations have been used for more than 50 years to estimate ex post the partial effects of trade costs on international trade flows, and the well-known - and traditionally presumed exogenous - "trade-cost elasticity" plays a central role in computing general equilibrium trade-flow and...

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...

More than half of the World Trade Organization (WTO)-notified services trade agreements (STAs) in effect since 2008 have involved at least one (South or Southeast) Asian trading partner. Drawing on Baier and Bergstrand's (2004) determinants of preferential trade agreements and using the World...

This paper documents the novel fact that Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) decrease bilateral trade imbalances as measured by conventional measure of the net export share in gross trade. While on average an RTA decreases bilateral trade imbalance by 7%, greater trade integration through a deeper...

The paper examines the trend and composition of agricultural trade between Indian and Pakistan and identifies opportunities for increasing bilateral trade. It examines the bilateral agriculture trade before and after the implementation of SAFTA. The study also analyses the comparative advantage...

In this paper, we examine the territoriality principle under preferential rules of origin. The territoriality principle under preferential rules of origin provides that when a material is imported from outside the territory of a party, the material would be entirely treated as non-originating...

Depoliticisation of investment dispute settlement is considered to be one of the principal reasons and advantages of investor-State arbitrations. This paper considers the added value that the depoliticisation vocabulary brings to the resolution of modern challenges. First of all, equating...

Because international trade theory has not provided an unambiguous prediction on the impact of trade on growth, a vast literature tried to identify the relationship empirically. After summarizing the influential large country case studies of the 1970s and early 1980s - which showed the folly of...