Many recent international agreements sponsored by bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), aim to facilitate the global free flow of goods, services and capital, by opening markets under the threat of trade sanctions. Nation States signing such agreements, in particular the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), agree to suffer a sovereignty deficit in order to...

This paper reviews the theoretical and the empirical literature on regionalism. The formation of regional trade agreements has been, by far, the most popular form of reciprocal trade liberalization in the last fifteen years. The discriminatory character of these agreements has raised three main concerns: that trade diversion would be rampant, because special interest groups would induce governm...

ITH the future of the Doha Round uncertain, there has been a sharp increase in the number of bilateral and regional trade agreements. This has revived long-running arguments in international economics between those promoting global trade agreements and those favoring regional approaches. But in many ways this has been the wrong debate, especially for the world’s smallest, poorest, and most geog...

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Introduction: Over the past fifteen years, there has been a dramatic rise in the number and range of regional or preferential trade agreements (PTAs). 1 There is evidence to suggest that market driven regional trading blocs are emerging in the European neighbourhood, the Americas and East Asia. The US is actively pursuing FTA in the Americas and East and South-East Asia. The European Union (EU)...

This paper seeks to establish empirically that institutions matter to financial markets. To this end, I look at the impact of five different regional trade agreements (RTAs) on a composite of four different financial instruments that account for default risk on sovereign debt in developing countries. As expected, some of the agreements have a stronger impact on default risk than others. Althoug...