Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

In May 2013 the ASEAN+6 countries began to negotiate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The objective of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of constructing such a region-wide agreement and to examine ways to multilateralize it. The paper first reviews free trade...

In May 2013 the ASEAN 6 countries began to negotiate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The objective of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of constructing such a region-wide agreement and to examine ways to multilateralize it. The paper first reviews free trade...

This chapter suggests a rationale for a simple, scalable, and fast computational approach through the ‘Data With Direction Specification’ (DWDS) to supplement the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The specification provides a way for digitally executable...

Is the recent proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in Asia a healthy development, or runs the risk of turning into an unmanageable noodle bowl in the future? The goal of this paper is to shed some light on this question. The results show that membership in the Asian RTAs considered...

This paper models the trade creating and trade diverting effects of the COMESA free trade agreement (FTA) and MERCOSUR over time using several theoretically consistent gravity equations. The extensive sector-specific TradeProd panel data set from 1980 to 2006 is employed throughout. From the...

This paper provides a new extension to the shift-share analysis to attribute the net shift to competing economies with a dynamic approach. This new extension is applied to analyze the competition among the ASEAN members in the East Asian (China, Japan and Korea) market for the year from...

Since the beginning of 2017, a paradigm change in international trade policy is observed. While the protectionist agendas are on the rise, the EU and Japan signed an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) on 17 July 2018. It is the most ambitious agreement of the EU with any Asian state. The study...

This paper examines the various arguments that have been put forth in favor of protectionism, from both an accounting and philosophical perspective. The author concludes that arguments against free trade are based on faulty premises, illogical reasoning or incorrect facts. Part 2. This paper was...

Trade liberalization has proceeded on the assumption that eventual aggregate welfare gains will exceed the losses. While compensatory mechanisms exist in most countries, they tend to be underfunded and ineffective. To begin to address this problem, the direct beneficiaries from trade...