We reassess, with industry-level data, the scale effect from trade protection, by means of a comprehensive fixed-cost variable, composing both technology coeficient and firms size, and a comparative (international) analysis. Evidence is based on Brazil’s manufacturing industries during its...

To access, with industry-level data, an ampler set of trade-policy effects under imperfect competition, which are: the competition, the scale and allocative effects. In theoretical terms, we rely on comparative advantages, underpinning the general-equilibrium analysis, and on spatial...

The impact of international students and skilled immigration in the United States on innovative activity is estimated using a model of idea generation. In the main specification a system of three equations is estimated, where dependent variables are total patent applications, patents awarded to...

Standards and technical regulations exist to protect consumer safety or to achieve other goals, such as ensuring the interoperability of telecommunications systems, for example. Standards and technical regulations can, however, raise substantially both start-up and production costs for firms....

A policy of national exhaustion says that the rights to control distribution, end upon first sale only within a country, thereby permitting rights holders to exclude parallel imports. A policy of international exhaustion states that such rights end upon first sale anywhere, and therefore permits...

The authors consider how service liberalization differs from goods liberalization in terms of welfare, the level and composition of output, and factor prices within a developing economy, in this case Tunisia. Despite recent movements toward liberalization, Tunisian service sectors remain largely...

The point of parallel imports of pharmaceuticals is arbitrage between countries with different prices. For several years, an important issue in the European Union (EU) has been the evident conflict between differing price regulations in the member states, on the one hand, and the consequences of...

Numerous proposals have surfaced recently to incorporate a clause about labor standards in the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Such a clause would require each WTO member to recognize and enforce certain core labor standards: forbidding forced labor, discrimination, and the...

Singapore is an interesting example of how the pattern of foreign investment changes with economic development. The authors analyze inbound and outbound investment between Singapore and a sample of industrialized and developing countries over the period 1984-2003. They find that Singapore’s...

There has been increasing use of technical regulations as instruments of commercial policy in the context of multilateral, regional, and global trade. These nontariff barriers are of special concern to developing countries, which may bear additional costs in meeting mandatory standards. Many...