Ensuring that Regional Trade Agreements Complement the WTO System: US Unilateralism a Supplement to WTO Initiatives?

Ensuring that Regional Trade Agreements Complement the WTO System: US Unilateralism a Supplement to WTO Initiatives?

In the mid-1990s, the policy debate within the WTO focused on whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) were building blocks or stumbling blocks for the WTO system, essentially questioning whether regionalism was appropriate at all from an economic policy perspective. Given the proliferation of RTAs since that time and the inability to roll back the clock, that policy debate has been replaced by...

The WTO Trade Effect

This paper proposes to reexamine the GATT/WTO membership effect on bilateral trade flows, using nonparametric methods including pair-matching, permutation tests, and a Rosenbaum (2002) sensitivity analysis. Taken together in a coherent manner, these methods provide an estimation framework that is robust to misspecification biases, allows general forms of heterogeneous treatment effects, and add...

In search of WTO trade effects: Preferential trade agreements promote trade strongly, but unevenly

a r t i c l e i n f o The literature measuring the effects of WTO membership on trade flows has produced remarkably diverse results. Rose (2004) reports a wide range of empirical specifications that produce no WTO effects. Tomz et al. (2007) use Rose's data but include de facto WTO membership, to find positive WTO trade effects. Rose (2005) also produced positive WTO trade effects after account...

BROKEN PROMISES: TRADE, AGRICULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE WTO Trade, Agriculture and Development in the WTO

WTO, Free Trade, and Oligopolies