Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

We analyze the extent to which the EU-15 and 16 transition economies used the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to commit to service sector policy reforms. GATS commitments are compared with the evolution of actual policy stances over time. While there is substantial variance...

We explore dynamic linkages between financial/banking sector openness, financial sector competition, and growth. We first develop an analytical model, highlighting links between long-run economic performance and the services trade, through scale economies and market and cost structures in the...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature touches on...

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO’s valuable role in restraining protectionism. What is on the table would...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...

This paper surveys the recent literature on Arab economic integration, discusses the goals and progress that has been made to date and some of the key policy, regulatory and political factors that underpin the segmentation of Arab markets. It argues that there has been an excessive focus by both...

This paper argues that further moves to liberalize trade and to implement existing GATT disciplines may have a greater impact on global competition than the pursuit of harmonized multilateral competition policy disciplines. It also suggests that current GATT rules and case law provide scope for...

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...

This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the WTO. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. We argue that moving forward on...