We use detailed trade, tariff, and income data for countries involved in 91 trade agreements negotiated since 1980 to test for reciprocity in free trade agreements. The results offer strong evidence of reciprocity in North-North and South-South free trade agreements, but there is little empirical support for reciprocity in North-South trade agreements. In particular, after controlling for other...

The paper investigates the network of bilateral free trade agreements (FTA) in the context of a network formation game with transfers. Furusawa and Konishi (2002) show that without international transfers, countries with different industrialization levels may not sign an FTA, so that the global free trade network, in which every pair of countries sign an FTA, is not pairwise stable in general. ...

Against the background of economic globalization and suspension WTO Doha Round, regional free trade area cooperation has flourished all over world. This paper mainly examines difference between impact FTAs on intermediate final products, explores agreements formation networks. Taking China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) in East Asian production network as research object, this uses gravitational...

In a recent paper, three economists — Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardoff, and Robert Stern — attempt to calculate the benefits of trade liberalization. They estimate that complete elimination of all trade barriers in the world would add $1.9 trillion (about 5%) to the world's gross economic product by 2005 (Brown, Deardoff, and Stern 2001). Brown-Deardoff-Stern's numbers look convincing, leaving the...

Small nations fear that FTAs with larger, richer nations will erode their industrial bases. These concerns are recognized in FTA and multilateral talks: small nations may explicitly or implicitly maintain higher trade barriers. Using a model where symmetric liberalization de-industrializes small, poor nations, we characterize the path of protection-asymmetries that allow liberalization without ...