Noting the trend toward more independent trade unions in developing countries, this article examines whether the presence of unions strengthens or weakens the benefits to be gained from economic policy reform. We show that the presence of “passive” unions—ones that choose their wage-employment contract given the firm’s cost-minimizing strategy—increases the welfare gains from trade liberalizati...

Food security commands much attention from policy makers and economists in China as well as in other less developed countries. Following WTO accession, the impact of trade liberalization has also received much comment, particularly the linkage between food security and opening the border to more agricultural trade. To better understand how food security is affected by trade policies, this paper...

This paper focuses on the post-war process of creation of a global trading system and integration of world trade. As the former came into being, multilateral trade liberalization became an on-going feature of the global economy facilitating international trade, consequently importance of international trade in the global economy increased dramatically. Since the mid-1980s, mindset of policy mak...

liberalization of international markets affects level of pollution in developing countries more than in developed countries. therefore the impact of trade liberalization on environmental pollution is a challenge for policy makers. in this paper auto regressive distributed lags (ardl) and error correction model (ecm) methods are employed for a study of the relationship between trade liberalizati...

Trade preferences are a central issue in ongoing efforts to negotiate further multilateral trade liberalization. “Less preferred” countries are increasingly concerned about the discrimination they confront, while “more preferred” developing countries worry that WTO-based liberalization of trade will erode the value of current preferential access regimes. This tension suggests there is a politic...

World trade in dairy products is being transformed by trade policy liberalization and technological change in dairy processing. The mixed complementarity problem formulation to modeling product-specific dairy trade can overcome a number of the limitations of existing optimization models, and can facilitate desirable extensions to previous analyses.

This paper provides an empirical test of how U.S. interests and the GATT regime affect the likelihood of cooperation. Specifically, I examine cooperation on the issue of agriculture trade policy liberalization. By disaggregating different features of negotiations, I demonstrate which institutional features are most important and how they change the political balance in countries that favor agri...