This paper examines how interest groups influence the decision to negotiate trade problems at the bilateral level, through adjudication, or in a comprehensive trade round. The institutional venues available for trade negotiations vary in terms of issues, rules, actors, and duration. Interest groups have preferences over the choice of institutional venue because differences in the scope and timi...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community structures induced by geographical distances and regional trade agreements. We find that commodityspe...

The creation of a region-wide economic agreement in Asia has become a hot topic among trade policymakers in the region. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 2010 Summit Statement clearly states thatmembers should pursue a Free Trade Area of the AsiaPacific (FTAAP) by building on various ongoing regional cooperation frameworks including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)+...

Some economists worry about the ‘spaghetti bowl phenomenon’ expected from proliferating regional trade agreements (RTAs). In particular, the complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO) and trade diversion or suppression effects. This explains why almost half of the RTAs notified to the General Agr...