This paper examines the welfare effects of the formation of a free-trade area (a set of countries that abolish tariffs among member countries but let individual member countries to set external tariffs). If a representative consumer has love-of-variety preferences, the welfare function exhibits supermodularity in external tariffs: when a country is constrained to charge lower tariffs on imports...

This paper attempts to provide a critical approach to the issue of regional integration, one of the most important subjects over the last two decades and currently one of the leading debates that are taking place in the South. Although the importance of regional integration –given its correlation to the process of pacific change in international relations–, it seems that there is no satisfactor...

What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of 'diffusion theory' - meaning that deci...

This paper examines the welfare effects of the formation of a free-trade area (a set of countries which abolish tariffs among member countries but let individual countries to set external tariffs). If a representative consumer has love-of-variety preferences, the welfare function exhibits supermodularity in external tariffs: when a country is constrained to charge lower tariffs on imports of so...

This paper looks at multilateral processes in the ‘Asia-Pacific’ region and the impact of American foreign policy on them. The paper suggests that organizations like the AsiaPacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum have been made increasingly irrelevant as American policy becomes more bilateral and even unilateral, and as the very definition of the ‘Asia-Pacific’ becomes less certain as a con...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

Cover Page Footnote: Acknowledgments. This paper was first written for the conference “Comparative Arawakan Histories” organized by Jonathan Hill and Fernando Santos-Granero, held at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama in July 2000. I am grateful to all of the participants in that conference for their helpful comments on and generous tolerance of this marginal Aruan case. I am...

Professor Crawford 2 " The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by foreign trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value. " Thomas Mun, 1664. The movement of goods and services across borders has been a concern for as long as nation-states have existed. Now, in today's modern society of globalization...

Within the framework of this publication, an attempt has been made to reconstruct concept ethnoculture in ethnographic concepts N.M. Yadrintseva. The article emphasizes that ethnocultural ideas are not always explicated rich journalistic and heritage founder Siberian regionalism. authors proceed from fact theoretical constructions regionalism were fruitful result his practical immersion ontolog...