In the early 1980's, faced with a mounting debt crisis, most highly indebted developing countries increased trade barriers to generate more foreign exchange; but in the last three to four years, they have reversed course. Almost all highly indebted countries have undergone real devaluations and...

Based on static analysis, a number of studies argue that forming a regional trade agreement is more likely to raise welfare if member countries are"natural trading partners,"while other studies claim that the opposite is true. Schiff and Wang look at the argument from a dynamic viewpoint by...

The author examines the main distinction between trade liberalization under the General Agreement on Tariffs andTrade (GATT) and under regional trading agreements. Under the GATT, trade liberalization is based on the most-favored-nation principle. Under regional trade agreements, it is based on...

Over the past three decades, free trade agreements were mostly a European phenomenon European Free Trade Agreement [EFTA], European Economic Community [EEC], and their regional arrangements). Recently, this phenomenon has reached the Americas and is growing. The authors show that free trade...

The authors address two questions in this report : 1) have exporters in sub - Saharan Africa (SSA) faced more or less protection in Japan, the EC, and the United States than other developing countries and 2) to what extent has protection in those markets constrained SSA's export growth. The...

The authors study the effects of trade barriers and the persistence of past linkages on trade flows in the former Soviet Union. Estimating a gravity equation on trade among and between nine Russian regions and 14 former Soviet republics, they find that Russian regions traded 60 percent more with...

The authors have prepared this paper as a companion to the Trade and Production database, which contains trade, production, and tariff data for 67 industrial and developing countries at the industry level for 1976-99. The sector disaggregation in the database follows the International Standard...

The author argues that trade diversion based on tariff preferences can be welfare-reducing because there is a tradeoff between improved resource allocation and a loss in terms of trade - where the latter loss equals the lost tariff revenue of the importing country. With trade diversion based on...

This paper investigates the role played by domestic importers and foreign exporters in improving preferential access to the domestic market. To this end, the framework used in this paper extends the protection for sale analysis to explicitly model the role of domestic importers and foreign...

Not until the end of the twentieth century, the"second globalization,"has the ratio of trade to Gross Domestic Product been comparable to that during the first globalization, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century and was interrupted by World War I. Technological progress has...