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This edited volume has its genesis in a conference entitled New Paradigms in Economics of Welfare and Trade under Globalisation and Regionalisation. Held at the Coogee campus of the Australian School of Taxation (Atax), University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) from 8th to 10th August 2006, this conference brought together economic theorists from around the globe to celebrate Murray Kemp's 80th birthday. Conference participants and presenters included a former teacher, colleagues, co-authors, senior academics and many former students of Murray. After a two-year gestation period, the volume has finally been published. Half of the chapters in this book are derived from papers presented at the conference. The remaining half of the book consists of invited papers completed after the conference. All chapters in this volume were subjected to a formal reviewing and revision process.

Purpose – In this chapter we study the welfare effects of relaxing government restrictions on bidding by foreign firms for government procurement contracts.

Methodology – We use a modified version of the Tullock model of rent contests. Firms spend resources to influence decisions of awarding contracts. We consider the case where firms are heterogeneous in terms of lobbying effectiveness.

Findings – The opening of the bidding opportunities to foreign firms can, under certain conditions, improve social welfare of the liberalizing country. The gain partly comes from reduced aggregate domestic lobbying efforts, which implies lower social waste, and partly from tax revenue on the profits of winning foreign firms.

Practical implications – Our analysis indicates that when negotiating on opening up trade in services, governments should take into account the effects of foreign entry on domestic lobbying costs.

Purpose − The principal aim of this chapter is to present a comprehensive and critical review of Murray Kemp's contributions to the discipline of international trade and welfare economics.

Methodology/Approach − This chapter employs the critical literature review approach, including archival analysis and face-to-face interviews.

Findings − It is shown that Kemp has been a key player in the modernization of trade theory. In particular, he has extended the theorems of gains from trade in many different directions and under the most general conditions.

Practical implications − In surveying Kemp's research contributions this chapter provides a useful overview of the development of the normative theory of trade. It also examines a number of methodological issues that may prove to be useful to economic theorists.

Purpose – This chapter examines how preferential liberalization between a pair of countries affects the terms of trade and welfare of the liberalizing countries and on the rest of the world (ROW). We adopt a model with symmetric countries that generalizes previous work by relaxing assumptions on functional forms, which allows for the possibility that exports of member countries are complements for exports of the ROW.

Methodology/approach – This chapter uses general equilibrium welfare analysis for a three-country trade model.

Findings – We show that Kemp–Wan tariff adjustments require a decrease (increase) in the external tariff of members in a preferential trade agreement to accompany internal liberalization in the neighborhood of internal free trade when member goods are substitutes (complements) for non-member goods. However, the adjustment path of the external tariff to reductions in the internal tariff could be non-monotonic when preferences are not of the CES type.

Practical implications – Our results are of interest for the design of rules for multilateral trade agreements with respect to preferential liberalization, since they indicate how tariffs must be adjusted to eliminate negative impacts on non-member countries.

Purpose − This chapter reconsiders the role of the WTO in the world economy, where regional free trade agreements have proliferated to threaten its basic rule of multilateral and non-discriminatory tariff reduction and the deepening of globalization has developed international concern about labor and environmental standards to challenge its conventional practice of tariff negotiation.

Methodology/Approach − This chapter employs the general equilibrium approach of welfare economics in its analysis.

Findings − It is shown that the WTO should reconfirm its target of expanding and securing the market access property rights of member countries and engage in the international coordination of tariffs and other trade policy instruments to achieve this target, while leaving other policy targets such as propagating labor and environmental standards to other appropriate international organizations.

Practical implications − The steady move towards multilateral free trade has come to an end. This chapter offers a clear argument for economists and policy makers to regain confidence in the traditional role of the WTO/GATT.