Preferential Trade Liberalization:

CEP Discussion Paper No 1117 January 2012 Preferential Trade Agreements and the Labor Market

Labor market consequences are at the forefront of most debates on the merits of trade liberalization. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the primary form of trade liberalization in most countries, and several studies have shown that discriminatory and nondiscriminatory trade liberalization can lead to very different outcomes. Yet to date there has not been any attempt to study the...

Tariff Adjustments in Preferential Trade Agreements

In this paper we examine how preferential trade liberalization affects the terms of trade, external tariffs and welfare of the integrating countries and the rest of the world. Our analysis is based on a three-country, three-good, general equilibrium model with symmetric customs union (CU) members. The model generalizes previous work by considering more general consumer preferences and productio...

Preferential Trade Liberalization: The Traditional Theory and New Developments

Intra-industry Trade and Trade Liberalization: Evidence from Preferential Tariffs Data∗

Does exchanging similar products within the same industry facilitate trade liberalization? While decades of theoretical research identified forceful political and economic reasons for open trade in the presence of high intra-industry trade, there exists surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting the claim. We contend that the lack of evidence is attributable to the common practice of cou...

Deep Trade Policy Options for Armenia: The Importance of Trade Facilitation, Services and Standards Liberalization

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. The authors find that a DCFTA with the EU will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia, but they show that the ga...