Introduction

The question of Preferential Trading Areas, as we should call them in preference to the misleading phrase "Free Trade Areas" (and Customs Unions) which falsely equates them in the public mind and discourse with non preferential Free Trade, has never been distant from international economists' thoughts and concerns wince the beginning of the postwar period when the architects of GATT had to confront and accommodate then into the GATT via Article XXIV.

Their wisdom became a center of analytical attention, especially at the time of the steps taken to form the European Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and when, in what Bhagwati (1991) has called the period of First Regionalism, other Article XXIV-sanctioned PTAs were considered and even attempted in other areas. The Vinerian (1950) theory of PTAs, to which Meade (1955), Lipsey (1957)(1960) and other international economists at the time made important contributions, while preceding the formation of the European Community, developed more fully as a result of the singular event. The attempts at providing a more realistic rationale for the extension of such PTAs to developing countries, on the other hand, as a way of reducing the cost of any targeted level of industrialization, came from Cooper and Massell (1965a)(1965b), Johnson (1965) and Bhagwati (1968) at the time.