World trade is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO sets rules of conduct for the international trade of goods and services and for intellectual property rights, provides a forum for multinational negotiations to resolve trade problems, and has a formal mechanism for dispute settlement. It is the primary institution working, through rule-based bargaining, at freeing trade. In this book, Kyle Bagwell and Robert Staiger provide an economic analysis and justification for the purpose and design of the GATT/WTO. They summarize their own research, discuss the major features of the GATT agreement, and survey the literature on trade agreements. Their focus on the terms-of-trade externality is particularly original and ties the book together. Topics include the theory of trade agreements, the origin and design of the GATT and the WTO, the principles of reciprocity, the most favored nation principle, terms-of-trade theory, enforcement, preferential trade agreements, labor and environmental standards, competition policy, and agricultural export subsidies.

When designing a world trading system for the twenty-first century, “Keep calm and carry on” beats “Move fast and break things.” Global trade is in trouble. Climate change, digital trade, offshoring, the rise of emerging markets led by China: Can the World Trade Organization (WTO), built for trade in the twentieth century, meet the challenges of the twenty-first? The answer is yes, Robert Staiger tells us, arguing that adapting the WTO to the changed economic environment would serve the world better than a radical reset. Governed by the WTO, on the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), global trade rules traditionally focus on “shallow integration”—with an emphasis on reducing tariffs and trade impediments at the border—rather than “deep integration,” or direct negotiations over behind-the-border measures. Staiger charts the economic environment that gave rise to the former approach, explains when and why it worked, and surveys the changing landscape for global trade. In his analysis, the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements provides a compelling framework for understanding the success of GATT in the twentieth century. And according to this understanding, Staiger concludes, the logic of GATT's design transcends many, if not all, of the current challenges faced by the WTO. With its penetrating view of the evolving global economic environment, A World Trading System for the Twenty-First Century shows us a global trading system in need of reform, and Staiger makes a persuasive case for using the architecture of the GATT/WTO as a basis for that reform.

"Motivated by the structure of WTO negotiations, we analyze a bargaining environment in which negotiations proceed bilaterally and sequentially under the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle. We identify backward-stealing and forward-manipulation problems that arise when governments bargain under the MFN principle in a sequential fashion. We show that these problems impede governments from achieving the multilateral efficiency frontier unless further rules of negotiation are imposed. We identify the WTO nullification-or-impairment and renegotiation provisions and its reciprocity norm as rules that are capable of providing solutions to these problems. In this way, we suggest that WTO rules can facilitate the negotiation of efficient multilateral trade agreements in a world in which the addition of new and economically significant countries to the world trading system is an ongoing process"--NBER website

"We consider the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: (i) negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; (ii) governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the agreement is actually implemented; and (iii) negotiated commitments can be implemented only if they are self-enforcing. We thus consider the design of self-enforcing trade agreements among governments that acquire private information over time. In this context, we provide equilibrium interpretations of GATT/WTO negotiations regarding upper bounds on applied tariffs and GATT/WTO escape clauses. We find that governments achieve greater welfare when they negotiate the optimal upper bound on tariffs rather than precise tariff levels; furthermore, when governments negotiate the optimal upper bound on tariffs, the observed applied tariffs often fall strictly below the bound. Our analysis also provides a novel interpretation of a feature of the WTO Safeguard Agreement, under which escape clause actions cannot be re-imposed in the same industry for a time period equal to the duration of the most recent escape clause action. We find that a dynamic usage constraint of this kind can raise the expected welfare of negotiating governments"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the contracting environment. We argue that taking contracting costs explicitly into account can help explain a number of key features of real trade agreements.

This paper proposes a theory that predicts low levels of protection during periods of "normal" trade volume coupled with episodes of "special" protection when trade volumes surge. This dynamic pattern of protection emerges from a model in which countries choose levels of protection in a repeated game setting facing volatile trade swings. High trade volume leads to a greater incentive to unilaterally defect from cooperative tariff levels. Therefore as the volume of trade expands, the level of protection must rise in a cooperative equilibrium to mitigate the rising trade volume and hold the incentive to defect in check.

We argue in this paper that the second-best nature of trade-policy intervention makes it likely that the issue of time consistency viii be an important consideration in determining both the extent and the efficacy of such intervention in most environments. The point is seen most directly by noting that a tariff is both a tax on consumers and a subsidy to producers of the import-competing good. Since first-best intervention typically calls for targeting each distortion with a separate tax/subsidy, the tariff will be a more effective policy tool if its consumption tax aspect can be separated from its production subsidy dimension. Consequently, if production decisions are made prior to consumption decisions, a government with sufficient policy flexibility will be tempted to surprise producers with policies other than those announced in an effort to make this separation. This leads optimal trade policy intervention to be time-inconsistent in a wide range of environments. We explore this idea in general terms and illustrate the results with specific examples.

And non-discrimination, the two principles that are the pillars of the multi- lateral trading system as embodied in GATT and its successor, the WTO. We show that GATT's principle of reciprocity serves to neutralize the world-price effects of a country's trade policy decisions, and hence can deliver efficient trade-policy outcomes for its member governments provided that the externa- lities associated with trade intervention travel through world prices. We then establish that externalities indeed travel in this way if and only if tariffs also conform to the principle of non-discrimination (MFN). In this way, the principles of reciprocity and non-discrimination can work together to deliver efficient outcomes for the multilateral trading system. We also consider within our framework the implications of preferential agreements for the multilateral trading system. The introduction of free trade agreements com- plicates the way in which externalities are transmitted across countries, and in this environment the principle of reciprocity can not longer deliver efficient multilateral outcomes for its member governments. We do find a limited place for customs unions in the multilateral trading system, provided that the member countries of the union have similar political preferences. As these conditions are quite stringent, we offer little support for the hypothesis that the principle of reciprocity can deliver an efficient multi- lateral trade agreement in the presence of preferential agreements. Instead, our results offer support for the view that preferential agreements pose a threat to the existing multilateral system.