Abstract Failure to reestablish an effective World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure, stop the erosion of multilateral rules and end China–US trade war causes capitals rethink policy. One response is redouble efforts strike agreements with major trading partners. Already countries accounting for about 78% world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are members mega-regional agreement...

The number of regional trade agreements has nearly doubled in the last four years. Interestingly, relatively small countries have put enormous effort into joining regional agreements with larger countries during this period. In this paper, we address the following question: why are small countries so eager to be a part of these agreements? We construct a general equilibrium model of a natural t...

One of the most striking development in the world trading system since the mid 1990s is a surge in Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). From about 50 till 1990, the number of RTAs notified to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has crossed 250 in 2003 and estimates indicate that over 300 RTAs will be in effect by 2007. Initially WTO encouraged the growth of RTAs because it believed that regional in...

This study examine the impact of Albanian free trade agreements on the overall economy in general and in agriculture sector, exports and imports in particular, turning out to be increased in significant amounts. These trade agreements have provided the Albanian economy with a competitive advantage and economic space. Among the countries with which Albania has free trade agreements Turkey, Kosov...

â â â  â â â â  abstract â  as the chances of a successful conclusion to the doha round of trade liberalization under the wto become increasingly problematic, so the pace of negotiating local free trade agreements (ftas) is increasing. according to the wto report, countries in the asia-pacific region are “consolidating their drive towards regionalism at an accelerated pace”. after the trade...

Over the past two decades, trade in tobacco and tobacco products has expanded dramatically as a result of a variety of bilateral, regional, and international trade agreements that have significantly reduced trade barriers. This chapter provides a brief discussion of arguments derived from economic theory suggesting that the reductions in trade barriers will lead to greater competition, lower pr...

This paper is concerned with the sustainability of free-trade areas. I begin with an FTA that is formed as a political equilibrium and examine conditions under which the FTA is sustainable, i.e., governments do not leave it. The sustainability of the FTA is in°uenced by governments' valuation on political contributions, discount factors, the lobbying position of the speci ̄c-interest group in in...

Recent work by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) establishes an empirical modeling strategy which takes full account of the structural, non-(log-)linear impact of trade barriers on trade in new trade theory models. Structural new trade theory models have never been used to evaluate and quantify the role of endogenous preferential trade agreement (PTA) membership for trade in a way which is consis...