Economic and Legal Aspects of the Most Favoured Nation Clause

Henrik Horn and Petros C. Mavroidis

No 2859, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: The Most-Favored Nation clause (MFN) forbids Members of a trade agreement to discriminate between trading partners. It is typically seen as one of the main features of the multilateral trading system, and appears in several of the agreements in the World Trade Organization. There seems to be a rather widespread belief among policy makers that there are strong economic rationales for the MFN provision. The purpose of the Paper is to survey economic theory that may shed light on whether this view is well founded or not, and to summarise salient features of the case law as it concerns MFN.

Keywords: Most-favoured-nation clause; Non-discrimination in trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-06
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Journal Article: Economic and legal aspects of the Most-Favored-Nation clause (2001)
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