This paper provides a rough test of a broad and prominent class of political economy of trade models and finds them wanting. The class features governments with weighted social welfare functions, including the prominent model of Grossman and Helpman. Whether the government is the single domestic...

This paper considers the economic sanctions that were applied in the mid-1980s to pressure the South African government to end apartheid. It asks what role those sanctions played in the eventual demise of the apartheid regime and concludes that the role was probably very small. An alternative...

In this paper we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights. We analyze new survey data from Ecuador, where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property. The latter come from a variety of sources, including the activity of a local boss,...

The costs of import substitution (IS) as a strategy for industrialization, which was deemed synonymous with economic development by many development economists of the fifties and sixties, were shown to be substantial in the influential and nuanced studies of the seventies and eighties under the...

I evaluate India's transition from an inward-oriented development strategy to greater participation in the world economy. While tariff rates have decreased significantly over the past decade, India is still one of the more autarkic countries. Despite improvement over the past in export...

The latest, and internationally controversial, issue relating to trade and human rights is that of labor standards. It has surfaced in international fora including the World Trade Organization (WTO). I will focus exclusively on this issue in the rest of this paper since an analysis of it...

This paper deals with poverty in developing countries.

I first describe how concerns about development of less developed countries were reflected in the evolution of the multilateral trading system, from GATT 1947 to the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negociation and the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In...

After reviewing th epost-World War II evolution of the international financial architecture, this paper presents a critical appraisal of current proposals for reform: limiting capital account convertibility, introducing an international lender of last resort, and reforming debt market...