Mercosur has achieved important advances like the removal of intrabloc tariff and non-tariff barriers and the establishment of a common external tariff for most products. However, its ambitious plans to deepen the integration process comprising harmonisation of policies in areas like competition policy, government procurement, technical barriers and phytosanitary measures have not been implemen...

Despite widespread belief that membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) improves the quality of governance, there is no convincing empirical evidence. Here, we investigate whether WTO membership has a causal effect on firm-level reports of political corruption using a nonparametric partial identification approach to bound the average treatment effect (ATE). We also analyze conditional A...

Using a simple monopoly model, we examine the effects of economic integration. We show that the number of markets and the shape of marginal revenue curves are crucial to evaluate economic integration when the marginal cost is not constant. The effects of tariff-reductions in a three-country model are in contrast with those in a two-country model. The effects also depend on what trade policy the...

MARKET STRUCTURE, TRADE LIBERALIZATION AND THE GATS J.F. Francois and I. Wooton Abstract: In this paper we consider the impact of improved domestic market access for a foreign service provider. We emphasize the interaction between the different modes of market access commitments in services (cross-border and establishment) market structure, and regulation. We work with a model where the domesti...

The few existing empirical studies of U.S.-Japan trade agreements have relied primarily on descriptive statistics or univariate time series methods. We conduct a more powerful test by evaluating agreements in the context of well-specified econometric models. Consistent with trade theory, import demand is modeled as a cointegrating relationship with income and relative price variables, where a t...

In a simple model where global trade negotiations precede sequential Free Trade Agreement (FTA) formation, we show global tari¤ negotiations can prevent global free trade: FTA formation can yield global free trade in the absence of global tari¤ negotiations, but global free trade never emerges when global tari¤ negotitaions precede FTA formation. Intuitively, global tari¤ negotiations can preve...

This article reviews the performance of the World Trade Organization in the oversight of national regulatory decisions affecting agricultural and food trade. A picture emerges of modest international disciplines on the regulatory decisions of sovereign nations and the need for ongoing improvements. A road map to regulations is presented and empirical assessments of the effects of technical regu...

This paper discusses critically the links between trade and competition policies, starting with the empirical literature which suggests that liberal trade policies and tight competition policy are, in a loosely defined sense, substitutes. Next, the underpinnings for the “substitution” hypothesis in a strategic environment, whereby trade liberalization may reduce the incentive to enforce anti-tr...

We study how the sequential formation of free trade areas affects trade flows between member countries. In a three–country, three–good model of comparative advantage if two countries have an FTA, and both sign a similar agreement with the third, trade between the two decreases. However, if only one of them signs an additional FTA, a huband-spoke pattern arises, and trade between the initial mem...