The Trans-Pacific Partnership includes a chapter on regulatory coherence and measures to reduce trade costs arising from divergent standards. We review the substantive content of the TPP's measures in light of existing processes in international organizations addressing good regulatory...

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become deeper over time, often encompassing a set of disciplines that go beyond traditional trade policy such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the policy and theory literature, a prominent argument why countries...

After a long impasse, Mercosur and the European Union are once again negotiating to reach a Free Trade Agreement. The benefits from such a trade liberalization would be significant since these are essentially complementary economic regions. An agreement would also end decades of costly trade...

Rules of origin (ROO) have emerged as an area in which consensus is hard to achieve among negotiating countries within an RTA. Disagreements over rules of origin have often deferred the implementation of several trade agreements. One of the reasons for this is because ROO are viewed as those...

EU-Japan free trade agreement negotiations have made promising progress in the shadow of highly scrutinized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Transpacific Partnership (TPP) talks. EU trade policy, it appears, has only been partially and selectively politicized "in favor"...

Trade costs associated with institutional failures and political risks, continue to serve as a big barrier to regional and international trade. Despite this strong impediment, limited work has been done to investigate the effect of weak institutions and type of political regime on bilateral...

The analysis covers the 270 RTAs currently in force and notified to the WTO as of April 2016. The analysis shows that half of all the notified RTAs, namely 136 agreements, incorporate at least one provision mentioning explicitly SMEs. These SMEs-related provisions are highly heterogeneous and...

This Research Report assesses the likely impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on the British Columbia economy from the vantage point of what is known as the negotiations enter the end phase of negotiations in the Fall of 2014. The assessment is based on a two-step process. First, the...

Since about a decade, we have seen a surge in interest as well as in the use of services preferentialism and unilateral services regulations. This paper provides an economic explanation of services regulation and services preferentialism, including their interaction. The paper derives hypotheses...