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This study intends to explore the impact of World Trade Organization (WTO) which came into existence from January 1, 1995, on the export share of developing counties in the world exports of all goods together in US$, that is, in global merchandise trade. This study endogenously determines the structural break in changing export share of developing countries and how are they related to the major changes in the multilateral trading systems of international trade, in particular, the introduction of the WTO by following a multiple breakpoint analysis due to Bai–­Perron. In this context, it would be worthwhile to note that the shift toward more export-oriented strategies by a large number of developing countries has accelerated the growth of LDC exports. This study also compares the changing share of merchandise exports and trade in commercial ­services for developing countries and the LDCs in the Post-WTO regime. The ­authors follow a univariate time-series exploratory analysis to understand the trend in world export shares of all goods and commercial services for different regions of the developing world and demonstrate the potential of these regions in the expansion of trade. The study, while evaluating the impact of WTO in changing export share in terms of structural change analysis, enables us to understand the role tariff cut in the developed countries on the imports from developing countries. This study also observes increasing inequality in terms of export share among different regions of the developing world.

The USA–China trade confrontation has become a major concern for all the nations involved in international trade. The retaliatory trade policies taken by both of these major trading nations have generated widespread impact among the trading nations especially on the developing and emerging nations. In this chapter, the macro-theoretic model is developed to show how a trade war can potentially arise in the wake of economic downturn led by some demand contracting force in one of the countries having trade ties and in turn can cause the recession to leap into global turmoil. This may prompt the countries to be more protective and averse to international exchange, thereby paving way to more intense trade frictions among the nations and stoking international macroeconomic propagation. Thus, the present introspection hints at tariff war among the nations engaged in restricted trade with each other being a plausible consequence of macroeconomic fault having cross-country repercussion implication and that in turn becomes more pronounced in the present tariff war leading to more fierce trade frictions among the countries.

Economic integration is an agreement among countries in a geographical region or unification of economic policies between different states aiming to reduce and ultimately remove tariff and non-tariff barriers on trade. The fruit of globalization is the tremendous rise of economic integration as globalization loosens barriers among the nations through reduction in cross-border duties and eases trade policies. Trumponomics is defined as the economic policies of US President Donald Trump that prefers high import tariff to bring “America First.” There is a debate among the researchers about the choice between free trade and protection or imposition of tariff. Some of them prefer free trade because during the start of the great depression, the world economy experienced a huge shift toward protectionism. Choice between no-tariff and tariff represents a prisoner’s dilemma situation whereby each player’s best response is to employ tariffs. This results in a sub-optimal outcome for all where the total volume of world trade falls, which is a Nash solution. The present chapter deals with theoretical discussions on trade war and throws light on the developing country’s choice between non-protectionism supported by globalization and Trump’s protectionism.

The present study deals with the growth performance of export (X), ­import (M), and economic growth (Y) in India over the period 1970–1971 to 2016–2017 as well as tariff (TR) for the period 1990–2017 by employing the methodology of one-time endogenous structural break suggested by Zivot and Andrews (1992). Also, an attempt has been taken to examine the direction of causality between the above-mentioned trade-related variables and economic growth using Granger Causality Test. Results of estimation reveal that all the variables converge toward a stationarity process having constant variability overtime. There exists structural break in the year 1996, 2006, 2008, and 2010, respectively, for economic growth, tariff, imports, and exports. Bidirectional causality is found running from economic growth to tariff and from tariff to economic growth. But there is unidirectional causality from imports to tariff, imports to exports and from exports to tariff.