World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In...

We investigate the impact of incremental trade liberalization in a dynamic model of endogenous growth with heterogeneous firms and costly trade. Growth originates from horizontal specialization and the steady state productivity growth rate is positive. Innovations require costly R&D and are...

This model examines the impact of a fairtrade labelling scheme on global and country-specific welfare in a two-stage north-south trade framework. In the first stage (the producer market) two northern processors buy a commodity from a group of small scale agricultural producers in the south...

The well-known question whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system (MTS) are strangers, friends, or foes (Bhagwati and Panagariya, 1996) has gained new importance with the widespread proliferation of RTAs in recent years. Based on an extensive data set which...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

We develop a generalized approach to the treatment of household inequality aspects of social welfare in general equilibrium models of trade. We follow a dual approach, highlighting how general equilibrium distributional aspects of social welfare related to import protection may be examined...

We examine the political economy underpinnings of import protection in general equilibrium. Starting from a dual theoretical representation of production, trade, and consumption, we map a general representation of the real economy to underlying political processes aka the political support...

The Asian countries are once again focused on options for large, comprehensive regional integration schemes. In this paper we explore the implications of such broad-based regional trade initiatives in Asia, highlighting the bridging of the East and South Asian economies. We place emphasis on the...

This paper develops a model for analyzing the costs and benefits of intellectual property enforcement in LDCs. The North is more productive than the South and is the only source of innovator. There are two types of goods, and each bloc has a comparative advantage in producing a specific type of...