Size Inequality, Coordination Externalities and International Trade Agreements
Nuno Limão and Kamal Saggi , ( 63 )
European Economic Review
10-27
October
2013
Abstract

Developing countries now account for a significant fraction of both world trade and two thirds of the membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, many are still individually small and thus have a limited ability to bilaterally extract and enforce trade concessions from larger developed economies even though as a group they would be able to do so. We show that this coordination externality generates asymmetric outcomes under agreements that rely on bilateral threats of trade retaliation. such as the WTO.

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