â â â  â â â â  abstract â  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...

Some economists worry about the ‘spaghetti bowl phenomenon’ expected from proliferating regional trade agreements (RTAs). In particular, the complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO) and trade diversion or suppression effects. This explains why almost half of the RTAs notified to the General Agr...

The paper examines the strategic stability and the e¢ ciency of free trade networks. We reconsider the endogenous tari¤ model introduced by Goyal and Joshi (2006). Di¤erent from their analysis with myopic countries, we adopt a new solution concept, pairwise farsighted stable set (Herings, Mauleon and Vannetelbosch, 2009, GEB), to examine the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) as a networ...