We analyze a panel of 230 Canadian manufacturing industries to investigate whether trade liberalization promotes efficiency through increased scale. During the six years following the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, Canadian manufacturing exhibited substantial rationalization – a decline in the number of plants accompanied by increases in output per plant. We find that the bilatera...

This paper studies the impacts of several tariff reduction formulas on market access to US and EU agricultural markets. The two main instruments for the definition of market access are tariffs and TRQs. A liberalization of these policy instruments does not automatically improve import opportunities as this depends on the interaction of MFN tariff cuts, and developments of domestic supply and de...

This paper quantifies the effects of trade liberalization on local labor market outcomes and workers’ migration patterns. I extend the classic specific-factors model to examine the impact of national price changes on local labor markets. The model describes how tariff changes across industries affect wages in local labor markets within the liberalizing country. In particular, wages will fall in...

Employment and Wage Cuts in Mexico's tariff levels were associated with a slight Effects of Trade decline in employment in Liberalization Mexico and with increases in average wages (perhaps reflecting improved The Case of Mexican Manufacturing productivity in the reformed industries and a shift toward the use of more skilled Ana Revenga workers). The wages and employment of skilled production w...

With the advent of cross-border electronic commerce, an increasing number of products that have been traded physically in the past are now imported digitally. This raises a number of issues, which are currently debated at the international level: should these products be defined as goods or services; which multilateral trade rules should govern them; and, should they remain tariff and tax exemp...

The paper argues that East Asian regionalism is fragile since (i) each nation’s industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth functioning of ‘Factory Asia’ – in particular on intra-regional trade; (ii) the unilateral tariff-cutting that created ‘Factory Asia’ is not subject to WTO discipline (bindings); (iii) there is no “top-level management” to substitute for WTO discipline, i.e. to ensure...

With the advent of cross-border electronic commerce, an increasing number of products that have been traded physically in the past are now imported digitally. This raises a number of issues, which are currently debated at the international level: should these products be defined as goods or services; which multilateral trade rules should govern them; and, should they remain tariff and tax exemp...