The number of regional trade agreements has nearly doubled in the last four years. Interestingly, relatively small countries have put enormous effort into joining regional agreements with larger countries during this period. In this paper, we address the following question: why are small countries so eager to be a part of these agreements? We construct a general equilibrium model of a natural t...

This Article will use recently decided intellectual property cases and other recent developments in European Community competition law to critically discuss the European Community’s traditional and strict pro-free trade approach in intellectual property cases. It will focus in particular on issues relating to the territorial nature of intellectual property rights. Part I of this Article examine...

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

On the Bilateral Trade Effects of Free Trade Agreements between the EU-15 and the CEEC-4 Countries The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE...

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...

As the chances of a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of trade liberalization under the WTO become increasingly problematic, so the pace of negotiating local free trade agreements (FTAs) is increasing. According to the WTO report, countries in the Asia-Pacific region are “consolidating their drive towards regionalism at an accelerated pace”. After the trade agreements between China an...