The degree to which countries are pursuing regional trade agreements (RTAs) has been nothing short of extraordinary. The latest wave of regional integration, however, is “breeding concern” among academics and policymakers as to the extra‐regional effects of these agreements and their...

Recent empirical studies have estimated the trade flow effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). One important, although largely untested, conclusion from this literature is that the GATT/WTO has worked well...

The proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) has motivated a significant number of ex post econometric studies investigating their agricultural trade impacts. The general conclusion is that RTAs increase members’ trade by as much as 150 percent, on average. In this article, we...

On July 30, 2008, the WTO negotiations broke down because Members could not bridge their differences on the operation of a Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) for low-income countries. This study evaluates two scenarios concerning the recent July (2008) SSM proposal – one in which low-income...