We investigate a mechanism whereby a group of nations forming a free trade area simultaneously can efficiently satisfy industrialization targets. The mechanism does not rely on cross-country transfers, and it is efficient for each member country individually even if other members of the free trade area do not implement the efficient policy. It allows each member country to gain from participati...

The paper evaluates the effect of the FAMEX export promotion program in Tunisia on the export performance of beneficiary firms using firm-level data. Propensity-score matching difference-indifference and weighted least squares estimates suggest that beneficiaries expand at the intensive and the extensive margin (markets and products). However, this expansion is short-lived for total exports. Ou...

This paper indicates that the consequences of regional trade agreements for the world trade system may be deceiving—an arrangement’s apparent virtue may constitute the source of its drawback. In a model where governments have political, as well as economic, motivations, I show that a free trade area induces its members to reduce protection against the non-members, and to do so sufficiently deep...

The paper has three purposes. First, it explains how the impact of liberalization of service sectors on output growth differs from that of liberalization of trade in goods. Second, it suggests a policy-based rather than outcome-based measure of the openness of a country’s services regime. Such openness measures are constructed for two key service sectors, basic telecommunications and financial ...

Hub-and-Spoke Free Trade Areas* This paper analyzes how the sequential formation of free trade areas affects the volume of trade between member countries. In a three--country, three-good model, if two countries have a free trade area, and both sign a similar agreement with the third, trade between the two decreases, and welfare rises in both. However, if only one of them signs an FTA with the t...

In this paper, we analyze the issue of optimal tariffs when the Northern and Southern firms compete in quantities in an imperfectly competitive Northern market and there are Ž . potentially varying degrees of intellectual property rights IPR violation by the South. IPR Ž . violation is reflected through the leakage of technological knowledge ‘‘spillovers’’ from the Northern to the Southern firm...

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We use quantile and quantile IV regressions to do so using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). Surprisingly, the results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model. ...

The consequences of free trade are investigated in an international duopoly under horizontal di¤erentiation and convex transportation costs. It is shown that the smaller country may bene...t from trade if it is su¢ciently small to allow for a signi...cant volume of exports by the domestic ...rm. On the contrary, the larger country never bene...ts from trade, since liberalization decreases the d...

abstract on 6 december 2006, australia and korea announced a joint study on a possible australia-korea free trade agreement (akfta) to promote trade and economic relations between the two countries. the paper provides empirical evidence on the possible gains and their transmission mechanism from this agreement. significantly, it uses a new economic policy modelling approach, the endogenous grav...

The main goal of the present paper is to analyze the effects of currency collapses (a large devaluation of country’s nominal exchange rate) on real gross domestic products of six Asian countries (Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Korea, and Turkey). A yearly data is collected from the WDI of the World Bank over the period 1980-2011. The econometric model includes the real GDP growt...