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The European Union (EU) has notified its revised Generalized System of Preference (GSP) on 31 October, 2012 which will come into effect from 1 January, 2014. The EU is also in the process of, or contemplating, to sign Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with many developing countries. Recently, EU has officially announced initiation of FTA negotiations with USA. Such preferential tariff arrangements could lead to significant erosion of preferences enjoyed currently by the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). In this backdrop, the main objective of the present study is to investigate the economic impacts originating from preference erosion in the EU market which could potentially affect LDCs in general, Bangladesh in particular. In this context, a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis has been developed by using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model and database to explore the aggregate impact of the preferential erosion as well as sectoral implications for which different partial equilibrium analyses were used. The analysis evince that if the EU eliminates all tariffs for Pakistan, India and Vietnam, Bangladesh's real GDP could decrease by 0.27 percent whilst welfare loss could be to the tune of US$ 54 million. Total exports to the EU will be reduced by 0.18 percent; consequently, Bangladesh’s terms of trade and exports of textiles and clothing could be fall by about 1 percent. The product level disaggregated analysis using RCA and unit price of major items also indicate that a number of products including textiles and clothing will be confronted with formidable market access difficulties in the EU.

This paper examined the volatility models for exchange rate return, including Random Walk model, AR model, GARCH model and extensive GARCH model, with Normal and Student-t distribution assumption as well as nonparametric specification test of these models. We fit these models to Bangladesh foreign exchange rate index from January 1999 to December 31, 2012. The return series of Bangladesh foreign exchange rate are leptokurtic, significant skewness, deviation from normality as well as the returns series are volatility clustering as well. We found that student t distribution into GARCH model improves the better performance to forecast the volatility for Bangladesh foreign exchange market. The traditional likelihood comparison showed that the importance of GARCH model in modeling of Bangladesh foreign market, but the modern nonparametric specification test found that RW, AR and the model with GARCH effect are still grossly mis-specified. All these imply that there is still a long way before we reach the adequate specification for Bangladesh exchange rate dynamics.