Two objectives of international commodity policy have been to reduce instability in exporter's earnings and importer's prices through international (buffer stock) agreements and to encourage further processing of domestically produced commodities by developing countries. However, it appears that...

Beginning in the late 1980s, Argentina implemented a series of reforms that were revolutionary in speed and scope, including trade liberalization. After the implementation of these policies, a record number of antidumping petitions came forward. Under a situation of high inflation, the...

There has been an explosion in the number of preferential trade agreements in the past decade. Preferential trade agreements are characterized by liberalization with respect to only a few partners and thus they can potentially clash with and retard multilateral trade liberalization. Despite this...

For a single tariff, the height of the tariff is an unambiguous measure of the policy's restrictiveness. With more than one tariff, theory has not provided an extension that captures the idea of the tariff's height, so analysts have used index numbers such as the mean and the coefficient of...

The footwear case provides an example of the complexities of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on the use of safeguards, and of the interaction of multilateral and regional processes of liberalization. As a result both of Argentina's unilateral liberalization and the removal of barriers...

The literature on regional integration agreements (RIAs) is vast and deals with political, economic, and political economy issues. The literature on the economics of RIAs deals mostly with static effects, and concludes that these effects are, in general, ambiguous. So far there has been no...

The author combines two theories - one about how multilateral trade liberalization affects regional integration, the other about how it affects political disintegration - to explain why the ratio of free trade areas to customs unions has increased over time. Ethier argues (1998, 1999) that...

In a series of recent papers, Neary and others have established the importance of trade in factor services, especially capital, in determining the welfare effects of import restrictions by tariffs, QRs, and VERs. In the absence of induced terms-of-trade changes and rental rate effects, Neary...

Egyptian economic history has been influenced by the import-substitution industrialization approach to development, dating back to Gamal Abdel Nasser's Pan-Arabic and socialist movement in the 1950s. Two major waves of liberalization have marked the government's efforts to rationalize and...

Morocco is interested in developing a reciprocal free trade agreement with the European Community (EC), although it already enjoys free access to EC markets in industrial products and is not obligated to give EC exporters reciprocal access. But Moroccan agricultural exports are impeded by...