The abundant literature about institutions regards the postwar trade regime as its " beau ideal " (Goldstein, Rivers, and Tomz 2007a, 38). Yet, it was only five years ago that Andrew Rose published the first systematic empirical analysis of its effects. Contravening conventional wisdom, he found that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization, did...

In a recent article in the American Economic Review, Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger (1999, hereafter B & S) have made a major contribution to answering the oft-posed puzzle (p. 215): What can governments gain from a trade agreement? Their answer is that:. .. a trade agreement is appealing provided that an inefficiency. .. exists under unilateral tariff setting.. .. Previous authors have est...

We build a multi-sectoral North–South trade model to analyze international intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. By comparing the Nash equilibrium IPR protection standard of the South (the developing countries) with that of the North (the developed countries), we find that the former is naturally weaker than the latter. Moreover, we show that both regions can gain from an agreement tha...

Even though widely recognized as one of the core disciplines of international economic law, the interpretation of national treatment (“NT”) obligation has been long marked by legal indeterminacy. More recently, a series of landmark cases, including US—Clove Cigarettes, US—Tuna II (Mexico), US—COOL and EC—Seal Products, have fundamentally reshaped our collective understanding of the NT obligatio...

Protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time. Rules-based disciplines like OECD industrial tariff bindings negotiated under GATT since 1947 and new Uruguay Round bindings on agricultural and services trade and on developing country industrial tariffs, constrain this variability. We examine the theoretical effects of such constraints on the expected cost of protection a...

Antidumping (AD) petitions are often withdrawn in favor of VERs and price undertakings. We compare foreign firms’ incentive to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI) under a VER and a price undertaking, with special emphasis on foreign rivalry. We show that a VER is less likely to induce FDI than a price undertaking or AD. Thus, the importing country can increase the level of protection by r...

This research is a cross-border economic study that explains the role of international trade organization, better known as WTO. The WTO was officially established on January 1, 1995, with GATT's pioneer. At time, existence GATT still temporary. framework for liberalization appears in form Agreement, which accommodates general provisions relating to trade. In Agreement agreed upon by member coun...

This paper analyses GATT/WTO trade negotiations in an oligopolistic multicountry setting and identifies a new rationale for trade agreements. When set unilaterally, tariffs are inefficiently high, both for familiar terms-of-trade reasons, but also to restrict market access of foreign firms. Trade agreements neutralise both the terms-of-trade and the market-access externalities and help countrie...

I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I show that “forbearance” where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock is a feature of an optimal agreement. This provides a rationale for countries not acting on retaliatory rights granted under GATT. I show that there is a limit to forbearance allowable in a self-enfo...