Building on the framework of Maggi and Rodr̀ıguez-Clare (1998), this paper will explore whether a small country facing domestic political pressures values joining a trade agreement with flexibility in the form of an escape clause (a feature included in many trade agreements, including the WTO). More specifically, this paper will examine if a government would prefer to join a trade agreement with...

The environmental impact of a regional trade agreement towards liberalization is an empirical question. The paper estimates the economic and environmental impacts of alternative trade policies of liberalization between six East Asian countries using Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) framework. The finding reveals that Japan will be in a winwin situation followed by Republic of Korea after ta...

This paper compares sequential trade liberalization through a preferential trade agreement (PTA) and one-shot multilateral trade liberalization with respect to the speed with which countries attain multilateral free trade. We build a three-country oligopoly model, including one developing country whose domestic firm initially uses old technology. Firm-level adoption of new technology and countr...

This paper investigates whether the India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement (ISLFTA) has had trade creation or trade diversion effects on the rest of the World. The method used resembles the one used by Romalis (2005) to study NAFTA. In order to use the variations in tariff at the product level, we use six digit HS classification of products. We construct seven panel data sets for the period 1996 ...