What Do We Know About Preferential Trade Agreements and Temporary Trade Barriers?

Chad Bown, Baybars Karacaovali and Patricia Tovar

No 201418, Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics

Abstract: Two of the most important trade policy developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers and the common feature that each can independently have quite discriminatory elements, relatively little is known about the nature of any relationships between them. This paper surveys the literature on some of the political-economic issues that can arise at the intersection of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers and uses four case studies to illustrate variation in how countries apply the World Trade Organization's global safeguards policy instrument. The four examples include recent policies applied by a variety of types of countries and under different agreements: large and small countries, high-income and emerging economies, and free trade areas and customs unions. The analysis reveals important measurement and identification challenges for research that seeks to find evidence of systematic relationships between the formation of preferential trade agreements, the political-economic implications of their implementation, and the use of subsequent temporary trade barriers.

Keywords: antidumping; safeguards; temporary trade barriers; preferential trade agreements; WTO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/WP_14-18.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: What do we know about preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers ? (2014)
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