By Xuepeng Liu Abstract: In his paper in the American Economic Review, Levy (1997) develops a political economy model of free-trade agreements (FTAs). He emphasizes that the homotheticity restriction of the production function assumed for the differentiated product is crucial for his model. This comment shows that this homotheticity assumption is unnecessary and actually problematic. It is prob...

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

concerns regarding the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. in the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

While traditional empirical models using determinants like size and trade costs can predict RTA formation reasonably well, we demonstrate that allowing for machine-detected nonlinear patterns helps to improve the predictive power of substantially. We find fitted tree-based methods neural networks deliver sharper more accurate predictions than probit model. For majority models, allowance fixed e...

Beginning in the late 1990s, Canada and the United States began requiring "Environmental Reviews (ERs)" of all trade agreements to be negotiated by each government. This paper, commissioned by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, outlines how ERs have evolved in North America, and evaluates the different methodological approaches that have been employed in ERs thus far. ...

Abstract On the occasion of 20th anniversary International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law & Economics , we conduct an extensive review papers published in this journal that address economic dimensions international environmental agreements (IEAs). We focus particularly on lessons learnt from body literature and implications for assessment design IEAs relation to goals such as effic...

BACKGROUND Regional trade agreements are major international policy instruments that shape macro-economic and political systems. There is widespread debate as to whether and how these agreements pose risks to public health. Here we perform a comprehensive systematic review of quantitative studies of the health impact of trade and investment agreements. We identified studies from searches in Pub...