Customs Unions and Potential World Welfare: a Proof of Viner's Conjecture

Trade-diverting Customs Unions and Welfare Improvement: a Clarification

Free Trade, Customs Unions, and Transfers

All countries would agree to immediate global free trade if countries were compensated for any terms-of-trade losses with transfers from countries whose terms-of-trade improve, and if customs unions were required to have no effects on non-member countries. Global free trade with transfers is in the core of a Kemp-WanGrinols customs union game. (52 words)

Free Trade Agreements versus Customs Unions:

Overlapping bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) are proliferating in East Asia. Quite a few economists worry about the spaghetti bowl phenomenon expected from the proliferating East Asian regional trade agreements (RTAs).The complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of FTAs can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO). As an alternative policy option to avoid the negative effect ...

On the Closed-Form Solution of a Nonlinear Difference Equation and Another Proof to Sroysang’s Conjecture

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First we derive theoretically, using appropriate transformation on x(n), the closed-form solution of the nonlinear difference equation x(n+1) = 1/(±1 + x(n)), n ∈ N_0. The form of solution of this equation, however, was first obtained in [10] but through induction principle. Then, with the solution of the above equation at hand, we prove a case ...

Optimal Currency Areas and Customs Unions: Are They Connected?

This paper examines the link between currency unions and customs unions. The size of a bloc of countries practising some form of co-ordination of monetary policy is limited by the incentive to free-ride that formation of the bloc creates. However, when the threat of a trade war is introduced, the stable size of the bloc increases. This suggests that a) large currency areas are more likely to em...