Search results for "International free trade agreement"
showing 8 items of 18 documents
On Subsidies in Trade Agreements
2008
When terms of trade externalities are the only source of cross-border inefficiencies, trade negotiators must negotiate market access only. Based on this principle, Bagwell and Staiger (2006) argue against the WTO subsidy rules. The present paper shows that their argument fails when trade agreements are required to be self-enforceable. By affecting output, subsidies impact the self-enforcement constraints, which, in turn, determine the policies of trade agreements. Consequently, trade agreements must include subsidy rules. In realistic scenarios, banning production subsidies is efficient while negotiating market access only is inefficient. In this sense, this paper makes a strong case for th…
The Protocol on Trade and the Creation of the Southern African Development Community Free Trade Area
2017
The author offers a much-needed analysis of regional economic integration in the SADC and explains the successful establishment of the SADC Free Trade Area. He outlines the demand for regional market integration in the SADC’s member states from a structural perspective in consideration of intra-regional economic interdependence and trade relations. Against this background, this chapter provides an explanation of the specific provisions of the SADC Protocol on Trade that determined the institutional design of the free trade area. In this respect, Muntschick highlights the key role of South Africa as the regional economic hegemon. Finally, this chapter evaluates the performance of the SADC Fr…
Exogenous Interference: The European Union’s Economic Partnership Agreements and the Stalled SADC Customs Union
2017
Focussing on the struggle for the scheduled SADC Customs Union, Muntschick reveals that extra-regional actors can actually have a negative impact on regional economic integration in the SADC. Firstly, this chapter refers to the organisation’s agenda on market integration and clarifies the intra-regional demand for the envisaged customs union. Secondly, it highlights the SADC member states’ important but asymmetric trade relations to the European Union and, in regard to this shadow structure of extra-regional interdependence, explains the interfering impact of Brussels’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) on deeper market integration in the SADC. This chapter concludes that the European U…
Intensità degli scambi agroalimentari tra i Paesi del bacino del Mediterraneo
2013
The Mediterranean has always been an area of strategic interest for the European Union (eu), which, since its establishment, has woven a compact network of relationships with its trading partners in the South and East of the Mediterranean, signing cooperation and then associative agreements with them. This study aims to present a view of how the agro-food trade network has evolved between the eu’s Mediterranean partner countries and their neighbors in North Africa and the Near East. To measure the extent of this trade specific indicators are used which are also widely used in economic literature, albeit to analyze trade in sectors unconnected to agro-food. In particular, analyses carried ou…
Intensity of Italy's agri-food trade with countries outside the EU Mediterranean
2013
This paper aims to present a framework of trade relations between Italy and the countries of southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. More specifically, using the indicators proposed in the analysis of international trade, we want to analyse the intensity of trade in agri-food products and the strength of trade ties between the bordering Mediterranean countries. The analysis of the intensity of trade flows of food products from Italy and the partner countries of North Africa and the Near East has allowed us to trace a network of flows between the countries in the area. If we can see an overall weakening of the agri-food trade, the analysis for individual partner states, however…
EMU and the Euro-Mediterranean Dialogue: Trade Interdependence between Mediterranean and Euro-area Countries
2009
Economic interdependence and trade encourage international dialogue and represent a base for reducing international conflicts. Hence, international co-operation for the reduction of barriers to trade and capital flows can be important not only in inducing economic progress, but also in promoting peace (Polachek and Siegle 2006). In this respect, the introduction of the euro represents an epochal event for both the participants in the single European currency and for their external partners, and in particular those in neighbouring regions. However, whilst a large body of literature has focused on analysing the first, in particular, with respect to the impact of the euro on intra-regional tra…
Integración y transformación económica en África: potencial y limitaciones del Área de Libre Comercio Continental Africana
2021
In March 2018, the African Union gave way to the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area, the largest area of economic integration in the world by number of countries involved. As of June 2020, 54 out of 55 African Union member countries have already signed the agreement, thus showing an almost complete unanimity on this topic. AfCFTA comes up when industrialisation strategies and economic transformation in Africa seem to have taken over orthodox structural adjustment and post-adjustment approaches. AfCFTA aims to increase the scarce intra-African trade, boost economic transformation, create the regional value chains and help African firms to join the global value chains. I…
Regional Economic Integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC): Analysing the Dynamics and Performance
2020
This article analyses the dynamics and performance of regional economic integration in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It proposes an innovative theoretical approach to the analysis of regionalism that refers to cooperation theory and takes the impact of external actors explicitly into account. The motivation for this research stems from the observation of a new wave of regionalism in the Global South. Many of these new or reformed regional integration organisations (RIOs) comprise of developing countries, particularly in Africa. In contrast to expectations of most mainstream integration theories, new regionalisms in the Southern Hemisphere have come into existence and sh…