This tome, with almost 500 pages of well-written contributions in 11 individual chapters, dealing with key international trade issues between developed and developing countries, could well become a standard sourcebook in these areas in the years to come. But in another sense, the authors made an even more emphatic statement by dedicating the publication to Bijit Bora, a relatively young, first-rate economist at the WTO, whose sudden death in 2006 they and others rightfully considered to be ‘a major loss’ to the international economic community.

The publication basically provides the background and essential information across countries and topics dealing with the crucial issue of trade preference erosion. The contributions are written in a coherent manner that allows informed individuals, without prior in-depth economic knowledge of the topic, to come to grips with the multifaceted problems that need to be understood in ensuring that the policies applied are in line with achieving a more efficient global division of labor. As the global community attempts to introduce measures that allow less developed economies to profit from trade preferences, in a manner that doesn't significantly distort the long-term basic principles of an efficient international division of labor, this publication provides assistance.

Without wanting to predetermine the value of the individual contributions, the final chapter (written by Hoekman and Susan Prowse) deals with the essence of the overall topic: ‘From Trade as Aid to Aid for Trade’. But, as shown by Hummels (Reference Hummels2001), one of the most important aspects in restricting international trade is time. If the infrastructure for efficiently and quickly unloading goods from port of arrival to final destination in a country is not up to the cut, then the additional time ‘on the road’ between initial offloading and final delivery (or the reverse) adds costs that can rob a country of any competitive advantage it might have.

In other words, trade preferences can be eliminated by not having up-to-the-cut logistic infrastructure in the countries involved. Unfortunately this issue was not brought up in this chapter or in any of the other chapters. The terms ‘logistics’ or ‘infrastructure’ are unfortunately not in the final index. Aside from this aspect, the publication provides an excellent overview of what is relevant regarding trade preference erosion, coherently written by the contributing authors. It will no doubt become a standard reference source for future work on this topic.

The opening chapter by Hoekman, Martin and Primo Braga provides an excellent overview of quantifying the value of preferences and potential erosion losses. They do this in a manner that includes graphical presentations of the mechanics of preferences and preference erosion, as well as descriptions of assessing the magnitude of potential preference erosion regarding preference margins, potential coverage, utilization, and utility. These topics are accordingly dealt with in the next five, well-structured chapters dealing with the specifics in the United States, the EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

These are then followed by multilateral sectoral examinations of the impact of nonreciprocal preferences in nonagricultural market access and MFN liberalization in agriculture. The final three chapters deal with modeling the impacts of the Doha Round in general, regarding the Doha round specifically in the case of Africa and finally regarding trade as aid to aid for trade. The chapters include over 30 very useful diagrams and 80 tables, which truly help to understand the data they used and the results they came up with. It is a publication which can be highly recommended to anyone interested in better understanding the workings and impact of international trade rules and regulations, whether they are true economists or economically interested individuals.