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Strong evidence has shown that increased agricultural productivity and opened international trade are required to maintain and enhance food security. The multilateral trading system has been unable to keep trade open for one subset of agricultural products – those that use biotechnology in production. This chapter assesses whether preferential trade agreements can represent potential alternative sources of trade rules for dealing with trade in the products of biotechnology. This chapter analyzes and compares three case studies of preferential trade agreements (Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and Trans-Pacific Partnership), by focusing on negotiations pertaining to products of biotechnology. The three preferential trade agreements have shown little inventiveness in their attempts to put in place rules of trade for the products of modern agricultural biotechnology and have established forums where only issues can be discussed. They are forums to talk and talk without any means to force closure on negotiations. Given the inability to deal with the issue of biotechnology at the WTO or other multilateral forums, the recent and current negotiations of major preferential agreements represent the second best alternative which still needs to be analyzed and still needs to be understood by policy makers, academics, and the population at large. This chapter represents a first step in that direction.

Regional trading arrangements are proliferating at a rapid pace in the Asia-Pacific region, although the architecture that will eventually emerge remains uncertain. In this chapter we explore the economic implications for both China and its trading partners of the current crop of preferential arrangements and potential future developments in the Asia-Pacific region, using computable general equilibrium simulations. By doing so the chapter aims to identify factors that are likely to weigh heavily in the economic interests of the different participants in some of the alternative ways in which the trade architecture of the region might develop, and the extent of convergence or divergence in these interests.

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.

This chapter reviews the evolution of thinking about regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the policy developments reflected in three waves of RTAs during the last half century. Desirable and undesirable features of RTAs can be identified, but the central message concerns the ambiguity of outcomes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of the nation state and of multilateral institutions and the scope for intermediate levels of organization created by RTAs.

The main purpose of this chapter is to explore the role BRICS countries have played in the formation of regional (free) trade agreements. The present chapter tries to understand and document recent developments and directions taken by the BRICS countries either individually or in aligning with each other at the regional and mega-regional levels.

The chapter is largely empirical and descriptive to analyse the recent RTAs policies of the BRICS countries.

This chapter provides in particular as assessment of the impact on BRICS countries of the three recent Mega-RTAs; that is TPP, TPIP and RCEP. For this purpose, an attempt had been made to find out the commonalties and divergences in the RTAs policies of the BRICS countries.

The chapter is divided into six sections. After a brief introduction, the second section deals with the reasons for countries entering into RTAs. The third section documents the directions of the current negotiations on Mega-RTAs and its (potential) geographical implications for the BRICS countries. The fourth and the fifth sections deal with the current status of these RTAs and their noticeable impact on the response of the BRICS countries. The final section concludes the research with suggestions and recommendations.

RTAs and Mega-RTAs frameworks have been useful for BRICS countries. This recent development in trade negotiations can be regarded as promising for them.

This chapter provides a formal analysis of the economic welfare effects for large and small partners to free trade agreements. Michaely (1998) has demonstrated that large country welfare is U-shaped in the small country's size. I derive the welfare for the large country for all possible small country sizes, and show that the maximum possible loss for the large country is twice its tariff revenue. I identify the data necessary to estimate the welfare effects and consider how initial trade volumes, tariffs, and international price differences affect the large country's welfare.

Many functionalist models of international cooperation rely on punishment by states to enforce cooperation. However, the empirical record suggests that such state-based accounts offer an incomplete explanation of international trade cooperation. We argue that when theoretical approaches are adjusted to incorporate aspects of domestic politics and institutions, two key insights emerge. First, political pressure from domestic industries can be key in creating demand for violations of trade agreements. Since such pressure is affected by stochastic shocks, the temptation of leaders to commit trade violations can vary over time. The presence of a dispute settlement procedure (DSP) provides flexibility that allows leaders to respond to such pressure by occasionally committing violations and then compensating their trading partners, if the DSP finds that the violation was not subject to exceptions in the trading agreement. This flexibility enhances the willingness of leaders to sign cooperative agreements in the first place. Second, domestic politics can function as an enforcement mechanism for ensuring compliance with international trade agreements and DSP rulings. Voters can condition their electoral decisions on whether their leader complies with socially beneficial trade agreements. The DSP plays an important role in this account as an information-provider. For voters to hold their leaders accountable, they need information about what choices their leader has made and whether his actions constitute compliance with an international agreement. The DSP provides transparency and reduces uncertainty about these factors.