Trade and the WTO

Arnold Kling

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Andrew Rose has a paper entitled, Do We Really Know that the WTO Increases Trade?. His succinct Executive Summary: "No."

It turns out that membership in the GATT/WTO is not associated with substantially enhanced trade, once standard factors have been taken into account. To be more precise, countries acceding or belonging to the GATT/WTO do not have significantly different trade patterns than non-members.

I will be curious to see Peter Gallagher's take on this. Meanwhile, I find it plausible, since I think of these international trade organizations as just make-work for lawyers and bureaucrats.

For Discussion. Has anyone come across any discussion/criticism of Rose's empirical analysis?

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The author at Peter Gallagher in a related article titled Does WTO Membership Increase Trade writes:

I have two responses to this. First, I don't think that Rose's analysis shows what he says it shows. Second, I don't accept his premise that the value of the WTO lies in whether it promotes trade. [Tracked on April 18, 2004 4:14 PM]

COMMENTS (4 to date)

Latest Comment

Kimon writes:

Subramanian and Wei, "The WTO Promotes Trade, Strongly but Unevenly", NBER W10024.

Posted April 13, 2004 5:02 PM

Peter Gallagher writes:

Hi Arnold,

I accept your challenge. But I may need a day or two to read the revised version of the Rose paper. Other 'made-work' is distracting me right now (thank goodness...).

Incidentally, I referred to the reponse to Rose from Wei and Subramaniam last year in this story. I see Kimon is also aware of this paper.

I'll be back to you.

Best wishes,

Peter

Posted April 13, 2004 6:46 PM

Ivan from Croatia writes:

Contemporary world trade system is very far from libaral. This is very pragmatic system for rich countries. If we have this in mind, Rose´s results seem to be not very exciting. When I look at the world economy as a whole, it seems to me that nothing is how should be. I think that economic theory need a new definition of efficiency, which will be able to explaine why world economic system, together with its institutions, is not what economists expect, especialy liberal economists. I am working on it!

Posted April 15, 2004 5:15 AM

Jamie Lee writes:

I enjoy reading through this informal place. I will surely visit you again to see if anything new appears on it.
Good luck for the future.

Posted November 30, 2004 5:27 AM

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