Prospective studies of the potential health consequences of trade and investment treaties, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, are critical. These studies can make visible to trade policy-makers the potential negative impacts associated to such treaties and can influence the outcomes of such negotiations. However, few researchers have examined retrospectively the consequences of trade agreem...

This article evaluates the extent to which the establishment of the Andean Free Trade Zone (AFTZ) has led to an improvement of intra-regional trade, as promised by open regionalism, without reducing extra-regional trade. Open regionalism is a dynamic process in which economic agreements serve as intermediate steps towards integration with the world economy. The calculations of ex post income el...

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a growing awareness in academic and policymaking circles regarding the importance of institutions for economic development. Institutions constitute the rules of the game in a society or, more precisely, the restrictions designed by members of a society to influence human interaction. Any transformation affecting these rules may clearly have a dire...

The inherent tension between trade preferences and the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) principle has been mainly examined in the context of regional free trade agreements and customs unions. Much less attention has been given to non-reciprocal special trade preferences given by developed countries to developing countries. WTO rules on these special preferences are less explicit than WTO rules govern...

This paper reviews international issues in the supply of tobacco and tobacco products, including trade liberalization and globalization. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical foundations for trade and trade restrictions. This is followed by a description of the treatment of tobacco and tobacco products in recent multi-lateral, regional and bilateral trade agreements, as we...

This paper examines the relationship between regional economic integration and FDI in North America, where two RIAs have been established over the past decade: a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. (CUSTA) and a trilateral agreement (NAFTA) incorporating Mexico as well. The North American experiences suggest substantially more modest impacts of regional trade agreements o...

Geography causes African countries to experience a ‘proximity gap’. To overcome this gap a ‘big push’ may be needed in infrastructure. The cross-border nature of such infrastructure requires regional cooperation in at least four issues: transport infrastructure, trade facilitation, decentralization and local economic development, and migration. Because incentives for regional cooperation in the...

The Asia Pacific region was characterized in the second half of the twentieth century by an absence of regional trading arrangements. The situations changed after 2000, raising questions of sequencing and of the boundaries of the region. This paper argues that the proliferation of regional and bilateral agreements has been driven by the rapid emergence of regional value chains and centres on tr...

Regional Trade Agreements such as ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) are expected to increase the trade flows among member countries through trade creation and trade diversion. This paper employs the gravity model using manufacturing trade data to analyse this hypothesised effect in a time-varying context. The estimation results suggest that AFTA has expanded the trade substantially. The trade creati...