This paper considers the policy options of the West Bank and Gaza (WBG) with respect to trade and the exports of labor services. It concludes that i) a non-discriminatory trade policy (NDTP) is unambiguously superior to an FTA with Israel; ii) the WBG should pursue a NDTP with all its neighbors,...

This 2002 Article IV Consultation highlights that in 2001, overall real growth for Kuwait fell slightly as oil output dropped following OPEC-mandated production cuts. The real non-oil GDP growth decelerated to 0.5 percent from 1 percent in 2000 as the private sector investment remained broadly...

In this research an effort is made to point out some of the basic aspects on the discussion and extension of potential agreements in the free agricultural trade chapter from a quantitative optics. In order to support policy recommendations on how this liberalization could be made and which could...

The general objective of this study is to analyze the economic impact of the recently negotiated U.S. - Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Specific objectives are to estimate changes in trade and prices in different sectors of the U.S. and Australian economies and to determine the impact on...

The signing of the long-awaited Australia-Thailand free trade agreement (ATFTA) on 19 October 2003 at the APEC Meeting in Bangkok, the emergence of new Asian regionalisms such as ASEAN+1 (China) and ASEAN+3 (China, Korea and Japan), and other bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral FTAs...

This paper examines the proposed EU-GCC FTA, a free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Counil (GCC), which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The paper first takes a fresh look at the methodology generally applied to...

The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of the three main East-Asian free trade agreements (ASEAN, ASEAN-China and ASEAN-South Korea) on intra-regional and extra- regional trade. To do this, we use a panel-data gravity model with three regional indicator variables. On the basis of...

This paper assesses whether a bilateral FTA exerts a positive growth effect of the economies of the two countries engaging in the FTA. It employs a nonparametric matching approach, which is more faithful to questions posed by trade theories, imposes no specific functional froms on the relation,...

India is currently negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, which includes not only liberalization of commodity trading, but also a wide range of chapters including deep services trade liberalization, full investment liberalization, and stricter IPR conditions than the TRIPS...

This publication has been launched within the project “European Union – Republic of Moldova Trade Relations: Current Situation and Perspectives for Enhancement”. The project is sponsored by the Moldova-Soros Foundation. The major goal of this project is to help Moldovan government...