To the extent that foreign trade has been discussed in the debate about the transformation of former centrally planned economies, discussion has focused on what should be done to minimize the costs of external adjustment through managed foreign trade and exchange rate policies. Little attention...

The performance of the East Asian transition economies in export and income growth has been strikingly better than that of countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The East Asian economies have achieved remarkably high growth rates in outputs and exports without the often large...

Economic integration among developing countries became an important policy issue in the 1960s and early 1970s. But although intraregional trade increased in some trading groups, it remained a modest share of total trade. However, dramatic changes in the world economy have affected the...

Turkey undertook a major liberalization of trade policy in the 1980s. Import quotas disappeared, the Turkish lira was made convertible, and tariffs are generally lower. Those changes and the export subsidies that remain have removed the anti-export bias from Turkey's external incentive regime....

Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. The authors find, theoretically and empirically, that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the world....

Japan's continuing large current account surpluses have promoted a series of investigators to examine the volume and the structure of the goods that Japan imports. The usual charge is that Japan's level of manufactured imports is too low and that it is low because Japan has erected a wall of...

The author analyzes how changes in thinking about the role trade plays in economic development have been reflected in provisions affecting developing countries in the GATT and the WTO. He focuses on the provisions calling for the special and differential treatment of developing countries. The...

The focus of this paper is on the transition from a trade regime in a socialist economy to one based on a (more) liberal market economy. Thus, there is no need to detail the past and current nature of trade institutions, patterns and performance. However, the sorts of problems that a transition...

Antidumping is by far the most prevalent instrument applied by countries to impose new import restrictions. In the 1980s antidumping was used mainly by a handful of industrial countries. More recently developing countries have used it increasingly often. Since the World Trade Organization (WTO)...

Regional integration initiatives have surged in Latin America while many countries have undertaken unilateral trade liberalization, and external market access prospects have improved with the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round. The author examines the choices faced by one such country:...