Trade friction in the age of global value chains is primarily due to regulatory diversity. While lack disciplines WTO context on exercise powers by states, it difficult eradicate diversity, cooperation key reducing restraints that heterogenous regulations may impose international trade. Recent mega-regional trade agreements have gone beyond and put forward novel ambitious approaches address beh...

One of the most striking development in the world trading system since the mid 1990s is a surge in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). From about 50 till 1990, the number of RTAs notified to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has crossed 250 in 2003 and estimates indicate that over 300 RTAs will be in effect by 2007. Initially WTO encouraged the growth of RTAs because it believed that regional in...

abstractthis paper examines the impasse in the current doha development round negotiations andasks how the rules of the wto could be changed to facilitate multilateral negotiations andto increase the welfare of the member countries. it considers possible changes to the methodof negotiation. as examples of rules which are outdated, it considers the rules relating toregional trade agreements and ...

We apply the gravity model to examine the effects of the Andean Community and Mercosur on both intra-regional and intra-industrial trade in the period 1980-1997. After accounting for size and distance effects, the Andean Community preferential trade agreements had a significant effect on both the differentiated and reference products, in particular capital intensive goods. In contrast, Mercosur...

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of ...

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...

In the fast globalizing world, the combined effect of small market size, weak institutions, low human development, worsening terms of trade, persistent conflict and poor investment climate, pan-African cooperation as enshrined in the African Economic Community and NEPAD has been designated by African governments as the best overall framework for accelerating African development in the 21 centur...

The last few decades have witnessed a proliferation of preferential trade agreements and regional trading blocks. Yet little research has been done to integrate trading block considerations into country attractiveness and foreign direct investment decisions. In this paper, we show how network analysis can be used to study, track, and forecast the structural changes among countries in regional t...