Does Bilateralism Promote Trade? Nineteenth Century Liberalization Revisited

Olivier Accominotti and Marc Flandreau

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Textbook accounts of the Anglo-French trade agreement of 1860 argue that it heralded the beginning of a liberal trading order. This alleged success has much interest from a policy point of view: unlike modern GATT/WTO multilateral agreements, it rested on bilateral negotiations. But, in reality, how great were its effects? With the help of new data on international trade we provide empirical evidence. We find that the Anglo-French treaty and subsequent network of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trade agreements coincided with the end of a period of unilateral liberalization across the world, and that it did not contribute to expand trade at all. This is contrary to a deeply rooted belief among economists and economic historians. We conclude that, contrary to a popular wisdom, bilateralism did not promote trade in the 19th century.

Keywords: Trade policy; Bilateralism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01065617
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01065617/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Bilateralism Promote Trade? Nineteenth Century Liberalization Revisited (2005)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-01065617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().