In her paper, Sylvia Ostry argues that if China had joined the GATT, the negotiations would have been far easier since market access under GATT was mainly about border barriers. But since the Uruguay Round the concept of market access has been extended to include not only domestic regulatory...

The North-South gridlock is explored in more depth in the paper by Kathleen Macmillan. She notes that statements from Western political leaders, under pressure from increasingly vocal protestors, emphasizing the potential of trade liberalization to alleviate poverty in the developing world, have...

In recent publications it has been argued that the change of the skill structure of industrial employment is caused by biased technical progress rather than by increasing international trade with low wage countries. However, in linking prices for final goods with prices of primary factors, most...

The paper analyses sectoral patterns of intra-Asian trade for selected Asian countries as well as for sub-regions within Asia. Beyond a general trend towards manufactures, it reveals remarkable differences in specialisation profiles between lagging South Asian countries still concentrating on...

In this chapter, Daniel Schwanen addresses the impact of the major trade liberalization efforts undertaken by Canada and its trading partners beginning with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 1989. The author focuses in particular on the question of whether liberalized trade could...

The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...

International trade statistics and input-output tables are analyzed in order to test the hypothesis that international production networks have become more relevant. The share of imported inputs in the gross output value of the motor vehicle industry has grown significantly during the last two...