The paper estimates the effect of NAFTA’s rules of origin (ROO) on Mexican access to the US market treating explicitly the endogenous determination of ROOs. The first equation determines Mexico’s NAFTA (preferential) exports to the US as a function of tariff preference and Estevadeordal’s...

How are the benefits - and costs - of a customs union divided between member countries? Outcomes depend on the comparative advantage of member countries, relative to each other and to the rest of the world. Countries with a comparative advantage between that of their partners and the rest of the...

This paper estimates the effective market access granted under NAFTA in textiles and apparel by combining two approaches. First, we estimate the effect of tariff preferences and rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goods exported to the US and of US intermediates exported to...

Using a new set of measures of concentration of trade, I suggest that the opening up of trade to date has been greatly exaggerated. At least judging on the basis of trade concentration, agriculture and service sectors should barely be seen as globalised at all. Contrary to other recent studies,...

Since the early nineties, there has been a veritable boom in the market for all sorts of trade agreements, from bilateral to plurilateral ones, and leading to deep or shallow integration. This boom might at least in part be explained by newcomers in the race. Certainly by the European Union,...

A new method for measuring trade potential from border effects is developed and applied to manufactured trade between the old fifteen European Union (EU) members and twelve Central and East European (CEE) economies. Border effects are estimated with three theoretically compatible trade...

Regional integration is under discussion nowadays. In 1991, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay created the MERCOSUR regional bloc, which was fully consolidated in 1995. The stabilization problems suffered by the region since 1999, asymmetry problems inside the bloc, the growth of...

The link between regional integration and intra-industry trade (IIT) has been under scrutiny since it has been first suggested by the European integration process. However, the lack of reliable data and the difficulty to find a robust model for IIT made this relationship difficult to prove. This...