Revitalising Multilateral Trade Governance

Regional Trade Agreements in a Multilateral Trade Regime: An Overview

One of the most striking development in the world trading system since the mid 1990s is a surge in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). From about 50 till 1990, the number of RTAs notified to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has crossed 250 in 2003 and estimates indicate that over 300 RTAs will be in effect by 2007. Initially WTO encouraged the growth of RTAs because it believed that regional in...

Multilateral Trade Liberalization and Poverty Reduction

Bargaining Delay in Multilateral Trade Negotiations

This paper theoretically and empirically explores bargaining delay in tariff negotiations. By imposing a bargaining structure in an equilibrium trade framework, I derive many testable predictions of delay. I then take my model to the newly compiled GATT (Torquay) tariff negotiation data, which includes detailed (product-level) information of the timing and contents of countries’ (back-and-forth...

Africas Role in Multilateral Trade Negotiations

1846 Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa won fewer concessions on their exports in the Uruguay Round than did other developing countries, but they still emerged facing fewer or lower restrictions than others. They should be more active in the next Round, focusing negotiations not on trade preferences but on bound most-favored-nation tariff reductions. Summary findings Openness and liberal trade pol...

Effects of Multilateral Trade Liberalization on Prices∗

To analyze the effects on prices of simultaneous tariff reductions by multiple importing countries, we construct a simple three-country model where a good is produced by a monopolist with non-constant marginal cost and imported by two countries. We specifically compare two representative tariff-reduction formulas: the "fixed-amount" and the "uniform percentage" reductions. The uniform percentag...