This paper examines whether the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC) exerted any trade enhancing impact on its members by employing standard augmented gravity model as well as stochastic frontier gravity model. Panel data sets are constructed over the period of 1980 to 2008 for imports and exports of the bloc's main trading partners along with GCC countries. The major finding is that the trade enhancing effect of the bloc is significant. However, there is still huge unutilized trade potential between the member countries. Several diagnostic tests were run to check and rectify possible problems of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation as well as cross-sectional dependence.

This article provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and threat of imitation on Australia's export flows. Using data from all of Australia's trading partners over the period 1995-2010, an augmented gravity model is estimated in the context of an unbalanced panel. The empirical findings show that level of IPRs of importing countries and threat of imitation posed by the importing countries is both sensitive to Australian bilateral trade flows. These results therefore support the widely accepted positive nexus between the importance of IPRs and bilateral trade flows.