'Everyone against the protectionism of developed countries' Even if the debate on globalization pits sceptics and enthusiasts against one another, they seem to agree on exposing the protectionism of developed countries. This is illustrated by a recent report by OXFAM on trade, the way some...

Protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time. Rules-based disciplines, such as WTO tariff bindings and bindings on market access in services, constrain this variability. We examine the theoretical effects of such constraints on the expected cost of protection and offer...

This paper discusses major policy issues related to commodity dependence and export diversification in low-income countries. Contrary to some widely-held view, it argues that natural resources are not necessarily a ‘curse’ that condemns low-income countries to underdevelopment but can...

Concern is growing regarding the poverty impacts of trade liberalization. The strong general equilibrium effects of trade liberalization can only be properly analysed in a CGE model. However, the aggregate nature of CGE models is not suited to detailed poverty analysis. We bridge this gap by...

The People's Republic of China has been the number one target of antidumping actions filed by the U.S. Commerce Department on behalf of various domestic industries. One reason for this special status is because the PRC is one of the world's lowest cost producers. Because of the cost structure of...

We present two notions of “no arbitrage” in urban economic models and show that there is no model satisfying both. The standard hedonic housing model of urban economics and its generalizations are consistent with the first of these, but inconsistent with the second. We present a model...

We develop a model with a finite number of households and congestable local public goods where the level of provision, the number of facilities and their locations are all endogenously determined. We prove that an equal-treatment identical-provision second-best optimum exists, where all...

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non- satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations. We confirm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the...

We present a simple model of spatial evolution that avoids several problems that arise with more complex networks of players. We consider a world where pairs of players are matched forever. These players learn from the whole population but they are more likely to learn to strategies used by...

The goal of this essay is to introduce advanced undergraduates to urban general equilibrium theory.