If open world trading system continues to be the ultimate goal, then several important questions come up-whether the rise of Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs) should be welcomed as a step on the road that will ultimately reinforce global free trade or whether regional trading blocks should be condemned as institutions that undermine the multilateral system. Despite GATT requirement that all trade arrangements must submit to a review, no existing arrangement has ever satisfied requirements of Article 24, nor has any existing arrangement been outlawed due to such failure. If the GATT continues to review poor countries’ regional arrangements against the same standard as was applied to those of the past, then the GATT will remain a vehicle for the LDS’s to avoid policy reform and not a vehicle to advance that reform. The RTAs that divert trade away from the rest of the world are likely to be supported politically and also such RTAs will reduce the incentives for multilateral liberalization. The RTAs in the developed countries initially contributed to an increase in into-regional trade but the recent evidence is less conclusive. This volume brings together recent work relating to following issues of regional trading arrangements: 1. Regionalism Versus Multilateralism; 2. Regionalism and Trade Protection; 3. Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs) and the Outsiders; 4. Political Economy Aaluysis off RTAs; 5. European Union and the Americas; 6. New Regionalism and the Mercosur; 7. Asian “Open Regionalism’ Versus the RTAs; 8. The APEC and Europe; 9. ASEAN, NAFATA and Japanese Diplomacy; 10. Globalisation Versus Agglomeration. This series is dedicated to Raul Prebisch who underlined the dynamics of the world economy and the interdependence between the industrial countries of the North and the LDCs of the South.
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