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 paper deals with the investment effects of regional integration agreements and discusses how such arrangements may affect inward and outward foreign direct investment flows in the integrating region. After setting up a conceptual framework for the analysis, we provide three studies focusing on different kinds of regional integration: North-North integration (Canada joining CUSFTA), North-S...

Affiliates of German firms in Eastern Europe differ from those in the rest of the world. They have smaller sales and they employ more labor. Labor productivity is thus lower than in affiliates of German firms elsewhere. Moreover, multinational activity in Eastern Europe is mostly unilaterally whereas, for industrialized countries, bilateral FDI linkages dominate. In this paper, we aim at explai...

This paper examines the implications of international fragmentation of production for trade patterns in the Pacific Rim, with special emphasis on regional and global integration of countries in East Asia. The analysis reveals that the degree of dependence of East Asia on this new global division labour is much larger compared to the other countries in the Pacific Rim and Europe. Networkrelated ...

The paper addresses the linkage between certain aspects of the increasing economic integration of world markets and the level of child labour. We empirically examine, first, the often-cited conventional wisdom that multinational enterprises invest in countries where the extent of child labour is relatively high and, second, the concern that countries may gain an unfair comparative advantage in ...

This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from lowwage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longit...

For a quarter of a century African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have benefited from unreciprocated preferential access to the European Union (EU) market under a succession of Lomé Arrangements. Sunset provisions now apply to these concessions and after 2007 unreciprocated preferences will end. The EU is proposing that a network of Regional Economic Partnership Agreements (REPAs) repla...

Using a global general equilibrium trade model, the paper assesses the long-term implications of global rebalancing for Asian economies and explores the benefits of ChinaJapan-US integration. The analysis suggests that consumption evaporation and growth slowdown in the US and the consequent its current account correction would force China, Japan and other East Asian economies to undergo substan...

An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international investment would yield the opposite conclusion. We offer an explanation for these stylized facts by setting up...

The development of pre-industrial Europe was driven by the expansion of trade. This paper describes the patterns of trade and shows how they can be understood in terms of differences in trading costs. It discusses how the different levels of trade–from local to transoceanic-contributed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to the process of growth. JEL Categories: F14, F15, F43, N13, N73, O19...