Negotiating free trade

Identifying a trade-negotiating agenda

Negotiating efficient envy-free divisions

Division of a resource among multiple agents is a frequent problem in multiagent systems and fair, efficient, and decentralized allocation procedures are highly valued. A division of a resource or good is envy-free when every agent believes that its share is not less than anyone else’s share by its own estimate. As envy-free procedures are not efficient (in the sense of Pareto optimality) we ha...

Life after Bali: Renewing the World Trade Negotiating Agenda

• The crisis has contributed to a slowdown in global trade volumes, with trade virtually stagnant in the twelve months to July 2013. In this context, fruitful negotiations in the World Trade Organisation’s 9th Ministerial Conference in Bali are crucial to sustain the institution’s credibility and prove that multilateral negotiations can still deliver success. • WTO trade talks are the only ongo...

Beyond Trade Creation: Free Trade Agreements and Trade Disputes

This paper investigates the effects of the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade disputes. We construct a unique and comprehensive dataset on inter-country trade disputes from 1995 to 2007. The dataset covers 110 countries and 1130 trade disputes. We find that the incidences of trade disputes between two countries are positively associated with economic size, economic growth, and t...

Farsighted free trade networks

The paper examines the strategic stability and the e¢ ciency of free trade networks. We reconsider the endogenous tari¤ model introduced by Goyal and Joshi (2006). Di¤erent from their analysis with myopic countries, we adopt a new solution concept, pairwise farsighted stable set (Herings, Mauleon and Vannetelbosch, 2009, GEB), to examine the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) as a networ...