An Empirical Analysis of Trade-Related Redistribution and the Political Viability of Free Trade Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution increases the political viability of free trade in the US. We do so by assessing the causal ...

Motivated by the proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) in Asia over the last decade, this paper studies the challenges faced by the Asian “noodle bowl”—overlapping, multiple trade rules, regulations, and standards in Asia—in the process of regional and global trade integration. The paper first highlights the importance of trade and investment linkages among Asian economies that have for...

Globalization of intellectual property (IP) protection for medicines has been advancing during the past decade. Countries are obliged to adapt their legislation as a requirement of their membership to the World Trade Organization or as a condition of being part of international trade agreements. There is a growing recognition that, in low-income countries, stronger IP protection is a barrier to...

IN 1995 when the WTO was established, it seemed to be final confirmation of the success of a system that had managed multilateral trade relations since 1947. It provided an institutional framework within which governments were not only able to negotiate reductions in trade barriers but also to bind themselves to rules of conduct that, in principle, were both universal and nondiscriminatory. Abo...

We study the endogenous formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) in a symmetric three-country model with vertically related markets characterized by Cournot competition. We analyze the coalition-proof Nash equilibria in an FTA formation game in which each country forms an FTA with one, both, or none of its trading partners. We show that multilateral free trade is the unique stable equilibrium ...

Efforts to tackle climate change are taking place on multiple fronts. This includes trade, an increasingly important defining feature of the global economy. In recent years, free trade agreements (FTAs) have become primary mechanism policy and diplomacy. study examines development action measures in FTAs discusses what difference they can make tackling change. Its source research is based in-de...

This paper compares sequential trade liberalization through a preferential trade agreement (PTA) and one-shot multilateral trade liberalization with respect to the speed with which countries attain multilateral free trade. We build a three-country oligopoly model, including one developing country whose domestic firm initially uses old technology. Firm-level adoption of new technology and countr...