periods for different products, safeguard mechanisms, requirements to meet the trade partner’s myriad standards, and so on. So complex are such features that it is not uncommon for firms to pay the MFN tariff rather than do all the paperwork necessary to get duty-free access within an RPTA. And while they are potentially able to deliver gains to those who join them, RPTAs do so to some extent at the expense of excluded countries and so they contribute only a small fraction of the gains that can come from WTO-based multilateral reform – and yet they can involve major diversions of trade from other, lower-cost suppliers, and of trade negotiator attention away from WTO negotiations.<sup>11</sup> Even where the prospects for potential economic gains were shown to be slight, the politics were such that governments typically were undeterred in their drive to sign on to such agreements – especially in the cases of developing and transition countries negotiating with the EU or US.

Alongside the development of these PTAs has been a move, proposed by a small group of economists in the Asia Pacific region, for non-preferential or ‘open’ regional trade liberalization (Drysdale and Garnaut 1989, 1993; Garnaut 1996). In 1989 that led to the emergence of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. After a series of annual Heads of Government meetings, APEC member countries agreed in 1994, and have since reiterated that commitment several times, to move to free trade in the Asia Pacific region by 2010 in the case of developed countries and 2020 in the case of developing countries. Even though there is no legal binding on members to achieve that goal and retain that status beyond the deadline, the distinguishing feature of this long-term commitment is that, as with WTO commitments, the market opening is to be provided to all trading partners of each APEC country (MFN reform) and not just to other APEC members as in a free trade agreement. That makes it unambiguously a stepping stone to global free trade, albeit no more than a ‘best-endeavours’, non-binding one.

# **IV.  THE NATIONAL AGENDA**

In the absence of a global government, initiatives to negotiate multilateral or plurilateral/bilateral trade agreements come from national governments. Those governments also determine their own country’s trade policy and its unilateral reform agenda, albeit with actual or potential international agreements and other aspects of foreign relations in mind. It is therefore in influencing national governments that economists have their greatest impact. Most have done so from within their own country or region, especially in the developed countries. But some have done so via international financial institutions or United Nations agencies whose mandate is to assist developing countries (including those in transition from communism).

The economists’ influence on national trade policy agendas has come in two key ways: through promoting a paradigm (this section), and (see next section) through disseminating results from quantitative analysis (including empirical work aimed at helping national government’s decide on how many resources to allocate to unilateral, preferential and multilateral trade reform initiatives).

# **_Paradigm promotion in developed countries_**

> 11 They can also reduce welfare in the partner developed country through trade diversion, as was shown  using CGE analysis as long ago as the 1980s (Brown 1987, 1989a,b).

9