Preferential Trade Agreements: A law and economic analysis

This volume assembles a stellar group of scholars and experts to examine preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a topic that has time and again attracted the interest of analysts. It presents a discussion of the evolving economic analysis regarding PTAs and the various dysfunctions that continually place them among the priority items for (re)negotiation by the WTO. The book explores recent empirical research that casts doubt on the old "trade diversion" school and debates why the WTO should deal with PTAs and if PTAs belong under the mandate of the WTO as we now know it.-- Preferential trading agreements : friend or foe? / L. Alan Winters -- Third country effects of regional trade agreements / Caroline Freund -- Contingent protection rules in regional trade agreements / Thomas J. Prusa and Robert Teh -- The limits of PTAs : WTO legal restrictions on the use of WTO-plus standards regulation in PTAs / Joel P. Trachtman -- EU and U.S. preferential trade agreements : deepening or widening of WTO commitments? / Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis and André Sapir -- Labour clauses in EU preferential trade agreements-an analysis of the Cotonou partnership agreement / Jeff Kenner -- Do PTAs actually increase parties' services trade? / Juan A. Marchetti -- A model article XXIV : are there realistic possibilities to improve it? / William J. Dave