Trade Costs and Facilitation: Open Trade and Economic Development

The need for countries to facilitate trade and to reduce the transactions costs plaguing trade is receiving a lot of interest in policy circles, and in particular in the WTO, where trade facilitation has been one of the few good stories in recent multilateral negotiations. Is this interest justified? What have economic theory and empirical findings to contribute to our understanding of the value of free trade? This authoritative two-volume set, edited by two leading scholars in the field, o...