The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) establishes a multilateral framework for the liberalization of international trade in goods. Under the auspices of GATT, signatories have reduced tariffs affecting hundreds of billions of dollars in trade annually.1 GATT also constrains the use of quotas and other quantitative restrictions on imports and exports,2 the use of internal tax and reg...

This paper examines the welfare implications of an existence of free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) in the GATT system, in the presence of cross-foreign ownership among countries. In particular, two GATT regimes are analyzed: a pure GATT regime without any regional free trade agreements, and modified GATT regime with either an FTA or a CU. This paper argues that, when foreign ...

In this paper, two key questions are asked: why has the GATT/WTO worked in terms of multilateral tariff reduction and promotion of global trade, and to what extent will it act as a constraint on economic nationalism? To answer these two questions, three themes are laid out in the paper: first, the seminal economic model rationalizing the economic logic of the GATT/WTO is assessed; second, the p...

This paper provides an empirical test of how U.S. interests and the GATT regime affect the likelihood of cooperation. Specifically, I examine cooperation on the issue of agriculture trade policy liberalization. By disaggregating different features of negotiations, I demonstrate which institutional features are most important and how they change the political balance in countries that favor agri...

This Article describes briefly the way in which the system now operates and the major complaints that have been lodged against it. DISPUTE SETTLEMENT IN GATT

This paper proposes to reexamine the GATT/WTO membership effect on bilateral trade flows, using nonparametric methods including pair-matching, permutation tests, and a Rosenbaum (2002) sensitivity analysis. Taken together in a coherent manner, these methods provide an estimation framework that is robust to misspecification biases, allows general forms of heterogeneous treatment effects, and add...

This paper attempts to study the usage of the GATT/WTO dispute settlement mechanism and to explain its patterns across different regimes and decades, using a unified theoretical model. This study first explores the role of the degree of legal controversy over a panel ruling in determining countries’ incentives to block/appeal a panel report under the GATT/WTO regime. The model is able to explai...

from the very beginning of the attempts made to organize electronic commerce in international field, the most important subject has been classification of electronic commerce under any legal systems of the organization, i.e. gatt, gats, trips or a combination of the provisions of the gatt and gats. the hybrid and trips systems did not have the required capacity for the subject matter both theor...