A Political-Economic Analysis of Free-Trade Agreements

Philip Levy

American Economic Review, 1997, vol. 87, issue 4, 506-19

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that bilateral free-trade agreements can undermine political support for further multilateral trade liberalization. If a bilateral trade agreement offers disproportionately large gains to key agents in a country, then their reservation utility is raised above the multilateral free-trade level, and a multilateral agreement would be blocked. Bilateral agreements between countries with similar factor endowments are most likely to have this effect. It also follows that bilateral free-trade agreements can never increase political support for multilateral free trade. Copyright 1997 by American Economic Association.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (186)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%2819970 ... O%3B2-Z&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:87:y:1997:i:4:p:506-19

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().