In recent years, it has been encouraging to watch the developmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) become more sophisticated in their thinking on the benefits of trade liberalization. NGOs such as Public Citizen that are against all forms of liberalization are now rare. Most NGOs including, for example, Oxfam, Christian Aid and Action Aid today agree that poor countries would benefit fro...

North-South Trade Liberalization and Returns to Skill in the South: The Case of Mexico This study examines the effect of NAFTA, an instance of North-South trade liberalization, on returns to skill in Mexico. Mexico is abundant in low-skill workers relative to the US and Canada, and so, by the Hecksher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade model, NAFTA ought to have raised the relative earnings of low-skill wor...

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization on productivity in Vietnam. The gradual opening up of markets to trade over the course of the last decade culminating with the WTO accession in 2007 makes Vietnam an ideal case for exploring this issue. We use microdata on the population of manufacturing enterprises for the period 2001 to 2010 and match these to data on exports and impo...

There has been much controversy over the impacts of trade liberalization on poverty. Some have argued that trade liberalizations are beneficial to the poor in developing countries, while others have argued that the gains will be captured more by the non-poor. The policies of trade liberalization in China have reduced the NPRs of some agricultural products, which cut down the welfare of its prod...

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...

This article examines the effect of overlapping institutions in trade policy, where the World Trade Organization, preferential trade agreements, and other economic negotiation venues give states many options for negotiating rules and settling disputes. This article argues that overlapping institutions influence trade politics at three stages: selection of venue, negotiation of liberalization co...

We construct a time-variant, price-based measure of trade distortions in 28 manufacturing industries for a large sample of countries over the last four decades, documenting facts consistent with the argument that changes in relative prices are an important channel through which an economy’s openness affects outcomes. First, we find that price distortions at the aggregate level are negatively as...

The latest round of world trade negotiations, launched in Doha in 2001, has come to at least a temporary halt in the aftermath of the 2005 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Hong Kong. The familiar arguments about the benefits of trade liberalization have been updated and forcefully reiterated: According to the World Bank and other leading analysts, massive computer modeling exercises sh...

M economists accept that, in the long run, open economies fare better in aggregate than do closed ones, and that relatively open policies contribute significantly to development. Many commentators fear, however, that in the shorter run, one of the steps towards openness—trade liberalization— harms poorer actors in the economy, and that, even in the longer run, successful open regimes may leave ...