While the debate on whether countries should or should not sign trade agreements with selected partners continues, governments have significantly stepped up the rate at which they enter into such agreements. A number of such agreements have been signed lately and many more are under negotiation. Multinational firms get impacted by these agreements irrespective of whether these are beneficial to...

The paper focuses on regional trade agreements and economic co-operation and develops a new appropriate approach to study their impact on growth and trade. The approach is based on an endogenous trade-growth theory and novelly specified in an economic integration (expenditure) framework which is the conceptual foundation of regional trade agreements. Importantly, it also appropriately takes int...

Do the World Trade Organization and the Generalized System of Preferences foster bilateral trade? World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In th...

Here, we present the World Trade Atlas 1870-2013, a collection of annual world trade maps in which distance combines economic size and the different dimensions that affect international trade beyond mere geography. Trade distances, based on a gravity model predicting the existence of significant trade channels, are such that the closer countries are in trade space, the greater their chance of b...

Many researchers and authorities in the field of international relations agree on the issue that one of the factors to make relations between and among governments in through traders and exchanging goods among people of different lands, and as human societies develop in different fields, the economic affair and trades of these countries expand and develop, as well.  Thus, they, in turn, have ha...