I November/December of 1999, leaders from around the world converged on Seattle with the goal of launching a new round of trade negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This has been dubbed “WTO2000” in recognition of the new millennium. In light of the tremendous growth in world trade over the last fifty years— much of it fueled by multilateral trade liberalizatio...

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I evaluate in this paper the impact of Free-Trade Areas (FTAs) on the world trade system using a model that emphasizes the role of oligopolistic industries in the shaping of trade policies, on account of both strategic and political reasons. In this context, I find that FTAs are likely a “building block” of the multilateral system. One reason for that regards the finding that FTAs induce their ...

In this paper, we present one of the first direct microeconometric evidence of the impact of trade protection on household poverty in Ghana. The study examines the impact of Ghana’s trade policy reforms in the 1990s on poverty. We match trade policy measures at the two-digit ISIC level to household survey data for 1991/92 and 1998/99. We emphasize the possibility that the effect of protection o...

One of the longstanding questions in international economics is how to get a country with an economy mired in import protection to one characterized by free trade. Reciprocity and unilateralism are the two most popular answers that economists propose. Unilateralism, or “going alone” with trade liberalization, is the standard policy prescription for a small country that, by definition, cannot af...

This paper develops a new model of a trade agreement that puts at center stage the competing interests between firms within a sector. Larger firms favor trade liberalization whereas smaller firms favor protection. Lobbying by firms for or against the agreement is modelled as an all-pay auction, thus incorporating the feature that binding contracts over contributions for policies cannot be writt...