Regionalism in standards - good or bad for trade?, Vol. 1 of 1

About

Countries

Data & Research

Learning

News

Projects & Operations

Publications

Topics

Home > Data & Research > Author Profile > Report Details

Regionalism in standards - good or bad for trade?

Author:	Chen, Maggie Xiaoyang; Mattoo, Aaditya;	Collection Title:	Policy, Research working paper ; no. WPS 3458
Country:	World;	Date Stored:	2004/12/02
Document Date:	2004/11/01	Document Type:	Policy Research Working Paper
Language:	English	Region:	The World Region
Report Number:	WPS3458	SubTopics:	Environmental Economics & Policies; Economic Theory & Research; Trade Policy; Free Trade; Labor Policies; Health Economics & Finance; Trade and Regional Integration
Volume No:	1 of 1

Summary: Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. The authors find, theoretically and empirically, that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the world. Adopting a common standard in a region-that is, harmonization-boosts exports of excluded industrial countries to the region. But it reduces exports of excluded developing countries, possibly because developing country firms are hurt more by an increase in the stringency of standards and benefit less from economies of scale in integrated markets. Mutual recognition agreements are more uniformly trade promoting unless they contain restrictive rules of origin, in which case intra-regional trade increases at the expense of trade with other, especially developing, countries. The authors propose a modification of international trade rules to strike a better balance between the interests of integrating and excluded countries.


Official Documents Official, scanned versions of documents (may include signatures, etc.)
File Type		Description	File Size (mb)

	PDF 37 pages	Official version*	0.31
	Text	Text version**


Light-Weight Documents Lighter (less MB) documents which may or may not be the final, official version
File Type		Description	File Size (mb)

	PDF 37 pages	WPS3458	0.21

* The official version is derived from scanning the final, paper copy of the document and is the official,
archived version including all signatures, charts, etc.

** The text version is the OCR text of the final scanned version and is not an accurate representation of the final text.
It is provided solely to benefit users with slow connectivity.

Permanent URL for this page: http://go.worldbank.org/UE4DCFWO30