TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bagwell,Kyle
AU  - Bown,Chad P.
AU  - Staiger,Robert W.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Is the WTO passé?
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2015///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - June 2015; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w21303
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w21303
ER  -