Bulletin n. 3/2008
February 2009
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Kamal Saggi, Nese Sara
    National treatment at the WTO: the role of product and country heterogeneity
    in International Economic Review , Volume 49 Issue 4 ,  2008 ,  1365 - 1394
    This paper analyzes the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) national treatment (NT) clause in a two-country model where quality of goods and/or market size are heterogenous across countries. When market size is symmetric across countries, a reciprocal NT agreement (i) benefits the high-quality country, (ii) hurts the low-quality country, and (iii) delivers higher aggregate world welfare. However, such an agreement can arise in equilibrium if the high-quality country's market is relatively bigger and the quality gap between goods is small (i.e., goods are sufficiently alike). The qualitative nature of these results does not change when quality is endogenously determined.
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