Abstract

All industrialized countries offer ‘trade preferences’ in the sense of multiple import regimes offering different levels of market access to different countries but those of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors are particularly complex. As such, the EU offers a valuable case study for a more general phenomenon. But detail is all important. The EU case illustrates the difficulty of calculating the economic effects of a particular change to a trade policy that already includes multiple layers of market access. But applying these lessons to other countries requires detailed information on the differentiated trade practice of each, which is a point to which we return in the conclusions.