Rules of origin form part of the traditional trade policy landscape. They are necessary for any government that seeks to distinguish between different foreign sources of supply of a product. This paper provides a basic introduction to the conceptual issues that arise in this area. It discusses...

This paper assesses existing multilateral rules on government procurement from a developing country perspective. It summarizes the economics of discriminatory procurement and investigates to what extent data on procurement reported by members of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA)...

At the same time as regional agreements to liberalize trade in services were being pursued by OECD countries, services were also introduced onto the agenda of a multilateral trade negotiation - the Uruguay Round. This paper focuses on the relationship between regional agreements and the draft...

Key questions in evaluating the justification for free trade agreements (FTAs) are whether formal international cooperation is necessary to promote greater contestability of markets through harmonization or recognition of regulatory regimes ("deep integration"), and whether any actions taken to...

Since the early 1990s, numerous countries have adopted or strengthened competition legislation. In this Paper we investigate the impact of competition law on industry markups over time and across a large number of countries. We find both domestic and foreign competition to be major sources of...

This paper surveys the major options that have been proposed concerning a possible agreement on trade-related anti-trust principles and evaluates both their desirability and feasibility. Three criteria are used to evaluate the options: (i) the extent to which they enhance the contestability of...

Actual and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. A simple model is developed that shows that the effects of import competition and domestic entry regulation on industry price-cost markups depend on country size. Barriers to...

In the late 1980s many developing countries experienced something of a paradigm shift, in that governments began to pursue more market oriented domestic policies. There was increasingly a perception that liberalizing access to service markets was a potentially low cost and effective method of...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

This paper surveys the literature on trade in services, focusing on the policies that are used to restrict such trade, the gains from liberalization, and the institutional mechanisms that have been adopted in the pursuit of liberalization. It argues that technological progress and international...