Bagwell, Kyle. <br/><br/>
Is the WTO passé? / 
Kyle Bagwell, Chad P. Bown, Robert W. Staiger. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2015. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w21303 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w21303. .
<br/><br/> June 2015. 
<br/><br/> The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and is now passing the baton to PTAs to finish the job? We survey a growing economics literature on international trade agreements and argue on this basis that the WTO is not passé. Rather, and subject to some caveats, our survey of research to date suggests that the WTO is structured in a way that is likely to encourage policy outcomes that are viewed as efficiency enhancing by WTO member governments, while the analogous claim for PTA-led liberalization is less clear. 
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