The Rose hypothesis has been knocked around for a couple of years. Tomz et al. are on the money, I think.

I first took up Arnold Kling’s challenge on the Rose paper just after the Cancun Ministerial meeting here [http://www.inquit.com/24/does-wto-membership-increase-trade], offering arguments along the same lines as Tomz et al.

But I now think that allowing the debate over WTO’s utility to drift down the back-alleys of regression analysis and into the black-holes of ‘gravity models’ leads nowhere. Or rather, it leads to arguments that will exclude most ’stakeholders’ who don’t feel up to the math (I’m one, I confess).

I tried a very different approach in a little story I wrote on the plane coming back from Cancun here [http://www.inquit.com/164/yes-virginia-the-wto-matters-a-great-deal]

Best wishes,

Peter