TY - BOOK ID - 11947068 TI - In Search of WTO Trade Effects : Preferential Trade Agreements Promote Trade Strongly, But Unevenly AU - Eicher, Theo. AU - Henn, Christian. PY - 2009 SN - 1462311385 1452787417 9786612842535 1451871783 1282842536 1451916140 PB - Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, DB - UniCat KW - Commerce KW - Business & Economics KW - International Commerce KW - Terms of trade. KW - Tariff preferences. KW - Differential duty KW - Discriminating duty KW - Generalized system of preferences (Tariff) KW - GSP (Tariff) KW - Preferences, Tariff KW - Preferential duty KW - Preferential tariff KW - Trade preferences KW - Tariff KW - Competition, International KW - Prices KW - Exports and Imports KW - Trade Policy KW - International Trade Organizations KW - Empirical Studies of Trade KW - Trade: General KW - International economics KW - Trade agreements KW - Trade balance KW - Plurilateral trade KW - Imports KW - North American Free Trade Agreement KW - Commercial treaties KW - Balance of trade KW - International trade KW - Luxembourg UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:11947068 AB - The literature measuring the impact of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTA) and WTO membership on trade flows has produced remarkably diverse results. Rose's (2004) seminal paper reports a range of specifications that show no WTO effects, but Subramanian and Wei (2007) contend that he does not fully control for multilateral resistance (which could bias WTO estimates). Subramanian and Wei (2007) address multilateral resistance comprehensively to report strong WTO trade effects for industrialized countries but do not account for unobserved bilateral heterogeneity (which could inflate WTO estimates). We unify these two approaches by accounting for both multilateral resistance and unobserved bilateral heterogeneity, while also allowing for individual trade effects of PTAs. WTO effects vanish and remain insignificant throughout once multilateral resistance, unobserved bilateral heterogeneity, and individual PTA effects are introduced. The result is robust to the use of alternative definitions and coding conventions for WTO membership that have been employed by Rose (2004), Tomz et al. (2007), or by Subramanian and Wei's (2007). ER -