A concern about regional trade arrangements (RTAs) is whether the discriminatory trade barriers applied to RTAs encourage high-cost imports from member countries at the expense of nonmember lower-cost goods. RTA impact evaluations have been hampered by a lack of appropriate empirical procedures...

The Pacific Rim members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group have different views about the role each should play in fostering further trade liberalization. But at the November 1994 APEC meetings in Bogor they committed themselves to forming an APEC free trade area. The authors...

This paper concludes that transparency, openness, and objectivity, are important parts of the American ideal of rule of law. Yet these procedural refinements seem to contribute more to the problem than to a solution. All the emphasis on doing things the right way distracts us from seeing that we...

It has been widely argued that, with the decline in trade costs (for example, transport and communication costs), the importance of distance has declined over time. If so, this would be a boon for countries located far from the main centers of economic activity. The authors examine the evolution...

While major concerns have been expressed about the spread of non-tariff barriers (NTBs) in developing countries, the lack of empirical information on the dimensions of the increase has affected the related policy debates. Using inventories of NTBs in developed countries compiled for 1966 and...

The author evaluates the progress in agricultural liberalization -and the welfare effects for least-developed and net food-importing countries- as a result of agricultural price shocks resulting from the Uruguay Round. She findsthat: (1) The changes in welfare are significantly affected by the...

A web of trade and payments arrangements binds countries of Eastern and Central Europe under the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) agreements. However, it is incompatible with these countries recent commitments to move toward liberalized trade and currency convertibility. The...

The relationships between trade facilitation, trade flows, and capacity building are complex and challenging to assess, both empirically and in implementation. The authors measure and estimate the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows across 75 countries in global trade,...

Sharing different stages of manufacturing between countries is of major and growing importance. But because of previous deficiencies in the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC Revision 1) system, it was not possible to differentiate between the international trade in components and...

Matching exporters'freight on board (fob) trade statistics with the corresponding importers'cost, inventory and freight (cif) data, this paper studies the quality of official information on trade between 36 African countries. The author found the disparities in data so great as to make the...