In this study new free-trade agreements are discussed, which are based on the breaking down of tariff and technical barriers and normally exclude most of the poorest countries in the world. Considering the current context of economic globalization and its health impacts, seven controversial points of these treaties and their possible implications for global public health are presented, mainly r...

From World War I1 until about 1980, regional free trade agreements and global trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) could reasonably be seen as complements rather than substitutes-as two aspects of a broad march toward increasingly open international markets. Since then, however, the two have moved in opposite directions. The 1980s were marked by stunning an...

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact...

Overlapping bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) are proliferating in East Asia. Quite a few economists worry about the spaghetti bowl phenomenon expected from the proliferating East Asian regional trade agreements (RTAs).The complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of FTAs can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO). As an alternative policy option to avoid the negative effect ...

The goal of this paper is to seek new insight regarding international tax policy by recasting it in paraUel with the theory of international trade. This is accomplished by defining a free trade taxation regime as one that is consistent with an efficient worldwide allocation of capital, and evaluating within this perspective various aspects of tax policy, such as value-added taxes, integration, ...

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...

The gravity model has been extensively used in international trade research for the last 40 years because of its considerable empirical robustness and explanatory power. Since their introduction in the 1960’s, gravity models have been used for assessing trade policy implications and, particularly recently, for analyzing the effects of Free Trade Agreements on international trade. The objective ...

In this paper, we analyze the following policy dilemma: strategic trade policy versus free trade when the domestic government is bound to intervene only after the domestic firm's strategic variable is chosen. This intervention allows the domestic firm to manipulate the domestic government and results in a socially inefficient choice of the strategic variable. However, commitment to free trade l...