Nowadays, trade negotiations afford both liberalism- and protectionism-oriented policies. Indeed, in recent decades, the developed countries have been actively engaged in negotiating many preferential agreements to integrate developing countries (DCs) into world trade and encourage their...

Over the last 15 years, the global trade of virgin olive oil (VOO) seems to face a stringent regulatory regime, mainly through the imposition of TBT and SPS measures. Such a development should have adversely impacted global levels of VOO trade. However, evidence shows that the world's imports of...

Non-tariff measures such as food safety standards are used to achieve the non-trade objective of protecting consumers' health and safety. However, they can also be used as a trade protection tool to drive a price wedge between domestic and foreign producers. This study investigates the...

The ususal sale of European agricultural products to Africa using export refunds has been heavily discussed in recent decades. At the centre of the discussion are the consequences on the agricultural producers in Western and Southern Africa. There are two different points of view: On the one...

Based on the 'Prebisch–Singer' hypothesis, a strand of literature has emerged that focuses on the phenomenon of commoditisation and 'commodity traps' in development. Following Kaplinsky (2006), we revisit the hypothesis on a country's terms of trade in manufacturing exports and imports....

Eight multilateral rounds of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and international agreements under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have contributed significantly to the reduction of tariffs among WTO members. However, the imposition and use of non-tariff...

Eight multilateral rounds of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and international agreements under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have contributed significantly to the reduction of tariffs among WTO members. However, over the years legitimate reasons for the...

Regulative non-tariff measures (NTMs), such as technical barriers to trade (TBTs) and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, have frequently been imposed to regulate the quality of imported goods when the market fails to address some issues of concern regarding harmful products with low...

Using a bilateral trade equation derived from a monopolistic competition model, we investigated market access reciprocity in food trade among the US, Canada, the EU and Japan. We explore country and industry-specific market access asymmetry through the border effect approach, re-challenging the...

Many different approaches have developed for the evaluation of non-tariff measures (NTMs) and free trade agreements (FTAs). Moving on from models using simple dummy variables, today a range of databases can capture different aspects of NTMs and FTAs. Some assess the depth of FTAs by extracting...