Trading Blocs: Alternative Approaches to Analyzing Preferential Trade Agreements

The recent proliferation of free trade areas and customs unions in the world tradingsystem has led to an explosive revival of interest in the economic analysis of Preferential TradeArrangements (PTAs). The principal theoretical question of the 1950s and 1960s (Viner) was whetherPTAs would create or divert trade, causing welfare improvement or loss. The principal theoreticalquestion (Bhagwati) of the late 1980s and 1990s has been whether PTAs encourage or discourage theworldwide nondiscriminatory freeing of trade. The essays in this volume present the centralcontributions to the analytical approaches developed to examine these questions.The first section ofthe book presents a synthesis and analytical guide to the issues, and to the theoretical research,as they have developed since 1950. The following sections contain the theoretical contributionsthemselves, grouped by analytical approach. This volume will enable graduate students, scholars ofPTAs, and policymakers concerned with trade liberalization to grasp the analytical relationshipsamong the sometimes disparate contributions of nearly a half century of theoretical research onPTAs.Contributors : Richard Baldwin, Jagdish Bhagwati, Richard Brecher, C. A. Cooper, W. Max Corden,Alan Deardorff, Ronald Findlay, Earl Grinols, Gene Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Harry G. Johnson,Murray C. Kemp, Pravin Krishna, Paul Krugman, Philip Levy, R. G. Lipsey, B. F. Massell, RobertMundell, Arvind Panagariya, Martin Richardson, T. N. Srinivasan, Robert Stern, Lawrence Summers,Jacob Viner, Henry Y. Wan, Jr.