In an environment of increasing importance of South–South bilateral trade partnerships, we assess the potential for improving bilateral trade between India and five Central Asian countries in this paper, and construct a trade potential index. We find huge untapped potential for increasing trade, and that India and Central Asia would benefit from policies that encourage trade, including bilatera...

This paper argues that the growing US trade de…cit has caused the decline of the WTO and the rise of regional trade agreements. A country in de…cit prefers to retain market power against countries with a large surplus. Multilateral cooperation restricts its choice. This notion is formalized in a three-country game in which countries negotiate multilaterally and, if that fails, bilaterally. The ...

The agenda of trade negotiation in the agri-food sector is characterized by an exponential increase sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). Their joint effect on puzzling still open empirical question. Once assessed standards provided SPS measures, study evaluates how regulatory cooperation commitments beyond World Organization requirements affect between sig...

As discussed in earlier chapters, the global regime of IPRs protection strengthened dramatically in the 1990s, primarily through TRIPs but also through unilateral initiatives and intellectual property chapters in regional trade agreements. I presented the legal structure of TRIPs in chapter 2, and defined the concepts in chapter 3 in order to set the stage for the positive economic analysis of ...

Searching for sustainable regional trade agreements (RTAs) for East Asia, we quantitatively evaluated the likely impact of proposed East Asian RTA strategies─(i) the AFTA (a being-leftalone strategy), (ii) an ASEAN Hub RTA (a hub-and-spoke type of overlapping RTA strategy), (iii) the AFTA vs a China-Japan-Korea RTA (a duplicating or competing RTA strategy), (iv) an ASEAN+3 RTA (an expansionary ...

Searching for sustainable regional trade agreements (RTAs) for East Asia, we quantitatively evaluated the likely impact of proposed East Asian RTA strategies─(i) the AFTA (a being-leftalone strategy), (ii) an ASEAN Hub RTA (a hub-and-spoke type of overlapping RTA strategy), (iii) the AFTA vs a China-Japan-Korea RTA (a duplicating or competing RTA strategy), (iv) an ASEAN+3 RTA (an expansionary ...

While traditional empirical models using determinants like size and trade costs can predict RTA formation reasonably well, we demonstrate that allowing for machine-detected nonlinear patterns helps to improve the predictive power of substantially. We find fitted tree-based methods neural networks deliver sharper more accurate predictions than probit model. For majority models, allowance fixed e...