Universidad de Montevideo, Facultad de Ciencias Empresariales y Economía, Departamento de Economía
Fecha
2010
Extensión
24 p.
Resumen
The big picture issue this paper intends to address is on the incentive aspects of a
multilateral trade liberalization. The paper builds on a framework originally introduced
in Grossman and Helpman’s The Politics of Free-Trade Agreements (1995). The aim
of that work was to explain the viability of free trade agreements (FTAs) between two
countries in a political-economy framework. A simple extension to a three-country
setting allows us to analyze whether FTAs are “building blocs” or “stumbling blocs”.
An illustration with specific functional forms serves to find conditions under which
FTAs are, somehow, partial building blocs, i.e., a bilateral liberalization can be feasible
when multilateral liberalization is not.