In recent years, there has been a proliferation of regional trading agreements. What are the consequences of such agreements for multilateral tariff co-operation? Are regional agreements ‘building blocks’ or ’stumbling blocks’ for the multilateral liberalization process? In this chapter, we develop a formal model that identifies important effects that regional agreements may have on multilateral tariff co-operation; and we find that the consequences of such agreements for multilateral tariff co-operation need not be clear-cut: regional agreements can produce effects which complement multilateral liberalization efforts, and can also produce effects which undermine the multilateral liberalization process. While we do not provide a conclusive answer to the questions posed above, we outline a framework of effects which can enable a better understanding of the possible impact of regional agreements on multilateral tariff co-operation. We also describe circumstances in which the net impact of the various effects can be determined.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 160 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.