Evaluating the economic impact of an FTA is an important part of the monitoring and surveying process that should follow the establishment of an FTA. This paper presents methods for evaluating the trade and welfare effects of an FTA. These methods show how to (i) compute indicators for the...

World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In...

There has been a proliferation of preferential trade agreements within the last two decades. This paper analyzes the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on external tariffs in small economies where protection decisions are made politically. It extends the Grossman and Helpman (1995) model by...

World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In...

We study, theoretically and empirically, how countries choose intra-bloc tariffs and preferential margins when they form Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). Our model indicates that countries should set systematically lower preferential margins when the bloc takes the form of a free trade area...

The proliferation of preferential trade liberalization over the last 20 years has raised the question of whether it slows down multilateral trade liberalization. Recent theoretical and empirical evidence indicates this is the case even for unilateral preferences that developed countries provide...

In this paper, we address the impact of multilateral trade liberalisation (MTL) on the preferential tariffs granted by the EU, which is one of the largest traders and one of the biggest contributors to MTL. We empirically address two important questions. First, if the MFN tariff for a product is...

The Caribbean Forum-European Communities (CARIFORUM-EC) Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) represents a new era of development cooperation and trade relations between the European Union on the one hand, and a subgrouping of the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) group of countries on the...

The paper develops two synthetic measures at the HS-10 level to depict effective market access for a country receiving preferential access and applies these to the market access ASEAN members would receive on impact following the implementation of an FTA with the EU. These measures reveal quite...

This paper presents two empirical tools to quantify the impacts of tariff changes on bilateral trade and welfare. Both tools are rooted in the structural gravity literature. The first tool estimates the impact of tariff changes on bilateral trade for 5,020 products in a partial equilibrium...