Confronting two formidable crises, one internal (the Doha debacle) and the other external (the global financial crisis), this Article explores the fundamental question: has the WTO become irrelevant or even passé? After sketching a recidivistic pattern of collapses and resumptions, the Article...

This paper examines the negotiations which led to the Brussels Convention of 1902 for the abolition of subsidies on sugar exports, showing how the practice of multilateral commodity trade negotiations was an outcome of this experience. Encompassing diverse fiscal systems, these negotiations...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that trade liberalization promotes innovation and productivity growth in individual firms. This paper argues that different types of trade liberalization - multilateral versus regional - may lead to different R&D and productivity levels of firms. Trade...

Why are some trade agreements concluded for a limited period of time while others have the form of evergreen contracts supplemented with an advance termination notice clause? We use a dynamic incomplete contracting model to demonstrate that the time structure of the trade agreement is related to...

Since the early 2000s, the European Union and the United States have pushed aggressively for the development of bilateral, plurilateral and regional trade agreements. Termed economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) by the European Union and FTAs by the United...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in the evolution of labor share in Latin American countries. We use trade agreements with large economies (the United States, the European Union, and China) to capture the effect of sharp changes in trade. In the last two decades, labor share has...

Rules of origin are critical components of preferential trade agreements designed to stop products coming in under insufficient transformation or through the partner that applies the lowest tariff. But in practice, these rules are often needlessly complex, undoing the benefits of market access...

The main objective of the African Continental Free Trade Area is to eliminate trade barriers and boost intra-Africa trade. This column argues that implementing the Trade Facilitation Agreement's provisions would be a powerful complement to the free trade area's tariff-reduction agenda. A...