Agricultural Trade and the GATT/WTO: Does Membership Make a Difference?
研究GATT/WTO成员身份对农业贸易流量的影响，发现尽管农业领域改革困难，该多边机构仍显著促进了成员间的农业贸易。
Recent empirical studies have estimated the trade flow effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). One important, although largely untested, conclusion from this literature is that the GATT/WTO works well if we ignore trade in agriculture ‐ one of the institutions seemingly apparent failures. This article investigates this conclusion using a large panel of agricultural and non‐agricultural trade flows. The results are impressive: the multilateral institution has delivered significant positive effects on members agricultural trade despite its sensitive nature and the reluctance of members to undertake serious reform. These findings are robust to various slices of the data and recent advances in the specification and estimation of the gravity equation to account for sample selection issues and the extensive margin of trade.