This paper examines the role of competition law and policy as tools for poverty reduction and development. The authors put forward five related principles, building upon the important work on related issues that has been done by the OECD, the International Competition Network (ICN), UNCTAD and...

The WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is a plurilateral Agreement, meaning that it comprises only a subset of the full Membership of the WTO. Currently, a number of WTO Members that are not Parties to the Agreement either are actively seeking accession to it, have commitments to...

Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

This paper gives insights into the possible trade creating effects of service trade liberalization via Mode 4. In particular we expect that temporary movements of persons, like permanent movements, have the potential to reduce transaction costs for merchandise trade between home and host...

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges for Southern and Eastern African ACP countries of services negotiations in the context of European Partnership Agreements. The paper provides an overview of existing flows in services from and to Southern and Eastern Africa, an overview that...

It has become increasingly common to produce goods in a number of geographically dispersed stages linked by international trade. This tendency, known by names such as production fragmentation, processing trade, and vertical specialization, has important implications for the analysis of nontariff...

Using the influence-driven approach to endogenous trade-policy determination, we show how a free-trade agreement (FTA) with rules of origin can work as a device to compensate losers from trade liberalization. The FTA constructed in this paper is characterized by external tariff structures that...

Most existing commitments are confined to guaranteeing the levels of access that existed in the mid-1990s, when the Agreement entered into force, in a limited number of sectors. The only significant exceptions are the accession schedules of recent WTO Members and the negotiating results in two...

This paper aims to provide insights into the market access issues arising in such negotiations. Should TISA negotiations result in participants exchanging the best commitments they have so far undertaken in their preferential trade agreements (PTAs) - a reasonable starting point - 'TISA market...

This paper assembles detailed information about the intellectual property (IP) provisions contained in 194 active regional trade agreements (RTAs) that had been notified to the WTO by November 2010. IP provisions in RTAs have been the subject of much study and commentary. However, much of this...