Publication Number: 3435

Report Title: International Economic Review: Measuring the Link Between Trade and Environment: An Application to North American Fisheries; Preferential Trade Agreements: Trade Diversion and Other Worries

Author's name(s): Grace Chomo, Michael Ferrantino, Michael Anderson

Date Published: June 2001

Report Description/Introductory Text: In “Measuring the Link Between Trade and Environment: An Application to North American Fisheries” the authors use a method designed to provide an upper bound for measuring the effects of trade liberalization for North American fisheries on production and environmental indicators. The authors’ final results imply that such effects are negligible.

“Preferential Trade Agreements: Trade Diversion and Other Worries” addresses the debate of whether preferential trade agreements impede or help the effort to liberalize. There is broad agreement on a few closely related issues. First, PTAs create losses from trade diversion, losses which are not present in multilateral trade liberalizations. Second, although these losses are typically small, we can find cases (like Mercosur) where they appear to be important. Third, trade diversion could become a major problem if the world becomes divided into a small number of competing trading blocks. Finally, a world of overlapping PTAs requires a complex set of rules of origin, and such complex rules are sand in the wheels of international trade.

Topics Covered: USITC, trade and environment, fisheries, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), preferential trade agreement (PTA), regional trade agreement (RTA), free trade agreement (FTA), customs union (CU), multilateral trade liberalization, regional trade liberalization, U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement (CFTA), European Union (EU), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), World Trade Organization (WTO), Mercosur, Andean Pact, Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), regionalism

Countries: United States, Mexico, Canada

HTS Numbers: 1604, 1605

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