We develop a new theoretical political economy framework called ‘parallel contest’ that emphasizes the fight over trade agreement (TA) ratification within countries. TA is inherently uncertain in each country because anti- and pro-trade interests contest other to influence their own government's decision. As terms-of-trade theory of TAs, removes externalities created by unilateral tariffs. But,...

One of the basic tenets in recent international trade literature is about the effect of trade integration on business cycle synchronization (BCS) among trading countries. The objective of this paper is to explore the main determinants of business cycle synchronization, with emphasis on trade integration. To this end, we have specified two simultaneous regression equations which were estimated b...