Regional Trade Agreements and U.S. Agriculture

Mary E. Burfisher, and Elizabeth A. Jones

Agricultural Economics Report No. (AER771) 156 pp, November 1998

Regional trade agreements (RTA's) have become a fixture in the global trade arena. Their advocates contend that RTA's can serve as building blocks for multilateral trade liberalization. Their opponents argue that these trade pacts will divert trade from more efficient nonmember producing countries. U.S. agriculture can benefit from participating in RTA's and may lose when it does not. Agriculture is the source of most potential U.S. gains from RTA's. While the United States, as a global trader with diverse trade partners, can gain potentially more from global free trade than from RTA's, many recent RTA's have been more comprehensive in their liberalization of agricultural trade than the Uruguay Round. A strong multilateral process can help ensure that RTA's are trade creating, rather than protectionist. (Please also see Regional Trade Agreements and U.S. Agriculture: An Overview).

Keywords: regional trade agreements, global trade, agricultural trade, multilateral trade, trade liberalization, Uruguay Round

In this report ...

Chapters are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

• Frontmatter,19 Kb
• Chapter 1. 1,199 Kb
  • Appendix 1. The Economics of Regional Integration; 273 Kb
  • Appendix 2. Regional Integration and Farm Household Adjustment; 395 Kb
• Chapter 2. RTA's and Agricultural Trade: A Retrospective Assessment; 225 Kb
• Chapter 3. Multilateral and Regional Trade Reforms: A Global Assessment from a U.S. Perspective; 502 Kb
• Chapter 4. A Dynamic Evaluation of the Effects of Western Hemisphere Integration on the U.S. Economy; 437 Kb
• Chapter 5. CEEC Accession to the EU: A General Equilibrium Analysis; 690 Kb
• Chapter 6. Farm Policy Reforms and Harmonization in the NAFTA; 406 Kb
  • Appendix 3. Chile Entering NAFTA: Implications for U.S. Horticultural Trade; 9 Kb
• Chapter 7. Regional Trade Agreements and Foreign Direct Investment; 31 Kb
  • Appendix 4. U.S. Foreign Direct Investment in the Global Processed Food Industries; 421 Kb
• Chapter 8. Agriculture, GATT, and Regional Trade Agreements; 44 kb
  • Appendix 5. U.S.-Israel Free Trade Area Agreement; 12 kb
• Chapter 9. U.S.-Japan Agreements on Beef Imports: A Case of Successful Bilateral Negotiations; 47 kb
• Chapter 10. Economic Integration and Open Regionalism in APEC: The Gains for U.S. Agriculture; 1,087 kb
• Chapter 11. Enlargement of the European Union to Central and Eastern Europe: Obstacles and Possible Consequences of Policy Harmonization; 152 kb
• Chapter 12. Western Hemisphere Trading Blocs and Tariff Barriers for U.S. Agricultural Exports; 518 kb
• Appendix. Model Documentation; 22 kb

Entire report; 6,691 kb

Order this report (stock #ERSAER771)

Updated date: November 1, 1998