April 2015, David Rosnick

This paper takes a careful look at a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) Working Paper that claims to find significant gains for liberalization of trade through the World Trade Organization. It is not clear that the reported gains are at all large. The IMF paper shows that multilateral liberalization increases consumption perhaps 0.014 percent. This would be about 43 cents per person per month in the United States.   

One significant result of the IMF paper is that potential gains of multilateral trade liberalization are very small even in a formal New Keynesian model incorporating economies with significant power in international markets.

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