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s trade? he sets off a crazy wave in academic. This paper estimates the impact on WTO and its predecessor GATT, and the GSP extended from rich countries to developing countries using a large panel data set and a standard gravity model to explore whether a country’s accession into WTO/GATT will increase trade or not. What shocked academia is that his result proved that membership of GATT/WTO had little relation with multilateral trade. This questioned many scholars because most of them expected that the WTO/GATT do really increase international trade worldwide.

Actually, though Rose proves that countries belonging to the GATT/WTO do not trade more than countries who abstained from membership with a large dataset and the gravity model, Tomz, et al. (2007) also make a comment to Rose's 'interesting mystery'. The authors comment that Rose's result is striking, because he has overlooked various countries which apply to the GATT/WTO and mistakenly classified them as nonparticipants while in fact they have a place in the organization. In this paper, the authors initially make an effort to identify the full membership of GATT/WTO. Actually, besides those formal members of the GATT, this paper regards three kinds of nonmember participates, say those colonies, provisional members and fact members, as valuable observations, which is different from Rose, who categorizes them as having no rights and obligations role under the GATT. Finally, after a similar empirical analysis with Rose, they show that the WTO/GATT membership indeed makes contributions to international trade growth.

Besides Rose's research mentioned above, Liu (2009) points out two issues in his literature, regarding the sample selection bias and the gravity model specification, using a large bilateral dataset and fixed-effects Possion regression method. As a result, the GATT/WTO is proved to be very effective in promoting international trade both in intensive margin and extensive margin, which addresses the puzzle raised by Rose (2004) to some extent. To define the extensive margin and intensive margin in Liu’s paper, he considered them as the depth and breadth of an economic quantity, or intensive border as well as generalized border in trade. In general, the extensive margin refers to the opening of new markets and exports of new products, while the intensive margin corresponds to the increase of the original trade in the same market. That is to say, the membership of the GATT/WTO not only promotes the exports of a product in the international market, but also boosts the trade in domestically market.

Additionally, Subramanian and Wei (2007) emphasize that the WTO has a great impact on international trade, but unevenly. In their paper, they try to make reconciliation between Rose’s findings and the widely accepted belief that the WTO increases bilateral trade. Indeed, various scholars consider that there exist asymmetries in the international trade. However, the reasons for all of those asymmetries are not explained. So Subramanian and Wei test three asymmetries in their research. Firstly, do the rich countries benefit more than developing countries in reciprocal trade negotiations? Secondly, if both of the trade partners undertake liberalization, is the bilateral trade greater than when only one of them did? Lastly, without liberalization in a country, would it not see an increase in trade? With the empirical result from their refined gr