Since the mid 1980s a substantial amount of research has been undertaken on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU, but an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of services sector liberalization. This paper surveys 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...

Trade and investment in services is inhibited by a range of policy restrictions, but the best offers so far in the Doha negotiations are on average twice as restrictive as actual policy. They will generate no additional market opening. Regulatory concerns help explain the limited progress. We...

This paper focuses on developments in the engagement of developing countries in the multilateral trading system in light of the recent re-issue of Robert Hudec’s seminal book, Developing Countries in the GATT Legal System. Starting in the late 1980s, just after Hudec published his book, a...

This paper brings out the special mechanism through which taxes influence bilateral FDI, when investment decisions are two-fold in the presence of fixed setup flows costs. For each pair of source-host countries, there is a set of factors determining whether aggregate FDI flows will occur at all,...

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...

The increased integration of the economies of Central and Eastern Europe with the European Union (EU) as the Europe Agreements are progressively implemented, is projected to have a significant impact on trade flows with Spain, as exports and imports grow very rapidly, albeit starting from a very...

This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade – what they might look like, what sort of political economy forces might drive them, and what the WTO might do to guide them. Two facts form the point of departure: 1) Regionalism is here to stay; world trade is regulated by a motley...

Transfers to individuals, firms, and regions are often regulated by threshold rules, giving rise to a regression discontinuity design. An example are transfers provided by the European Commission to regions of EU member states below a certain income level. Researchers have focused on estimation...