This paper analyzes the likely impact of European preferences, in particular of its Rules of Origin (RoO), on the prospects for integration of West Africa in world trade. We show that West African trade has not yet achieved the structural transformation of countries having successfully...

Trade theories covering Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) are as diverse as the literature in search of their empirical support. To account for the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing PTA theories, we introduce Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to the PTA literature....

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...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and...

Previous work has shown that a significant number of preference eligible goods are imported into the EU from developing countries at relatively small values and that the rate of preference utilisation of these imports are low and in many cases zero. This fact is unobserved in the aggregate...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...

Trade integration of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries' agriculture is pointed out as a powerful driver of agricultural growth, especially if it increases processing of agricultural products. But there is no consensus on which negotiations for increased trade integration to put first. Static...

The impact of the USA's agoa preferences on SSA countries is studied using a matching approach. The results indicate that agoa beneficiaries have exported less to the USA compared to their matched controls. However, this has not been the case for their exports to the EU which has seen a higher...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...