Preferential Trade Agreements, Trade and Multilateral Liberalization

The number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has skyrocketed in the last decades, with almost 500 PTAs already notified to the World Trade Organization. The explosive increase in the quantity of PTAs led to important contributions on its effects on trade, welfare, and worldwide protection. This Special Issue seeks to build on those contributions by focusing on the impacts of PTAs on trade, and on their interaction with multilateral trade agreements and policies.
Topics include, but are not limited to: the impacts of PTAs on bilateral trade between members and on trade with non-members, including the effcts of tariff and non-tariff barrier liberalization, the effects via the reduction of uncertainty, the effects via changes in productivity, endogenous PTAs, the effects on the number of varieties, the impacts of PTAs on trade protection (tariffs and non-tariff barriers) against non-member countries, non-members’ trade policy changes as a response to PTAs, the effects of preferences on protection against non-members by the preference-receiving countries, the effects of multilateral tariffs on preferential tariffs, and the substitution between policies that are and are not included in the agreements. Both theoretical and empirical studies are welcome.

Guest Editor:
Professor Patricia Tovar. Department of Economics. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. E-mail: ptovar@pucp.pe

Deadline for manuscript submissions:
15 July 2020.