The reduction of the existing global distortions to agricultural incentives is sometimes stated as a priority to fight poverty worldwide. But the impacts of global trade policy and domestic development policy reforms are rarely, if ever, compared. Despite technical limitations hindering rigorous...

This paper examines the issue of measuring logistics costs from an applied trade policy research perspective, as well as identifying logistics-intensive sectors. It focuses on currently available data at the macro- and firm-levels. Data sources considered include national accounts, national...

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services industries. The empirical analysis relies, on the one hand, on a dataset of theory-consistent bilateral trade costs calculated for 55 countries over the period 1999-2009 and, on the other...

Abstract This author sheds some light on the theoretical arguments on the use of selectivity and uniformity of trade policy in trade and industrialization for targeting industries and firms and provides a brief historical review of practices of developed countries and East Asian countries with...

The relationship between the US and Asia will be the single biggest determinant in the evolution of the global economic system. In the absence of adequate reform at the global level, the alternative could be further fragmentation into competing regional blocs. Asia holds the key, combining both...

This paper examines the experience of 10 Asian countries with respect to growth, trade and FDI. It explores relationships between the nature of exports and imports and growth, as well as the relevance of FDI as a channel for these relationships. We find that FDI is often positively correlated...

This paper characterizes the current SACU tariff structure, considers its rationale, proposes and evaluates some alternatives and offers some suggestions for reforming the SACU revenue sharing formula and regional trade strategy. While considerable progress was made until recently in...

The paper investigates the effects of the entry price scheme for fresh fruit and vegetables. The analysis is conducted on the European prices of tomatoes, lemons and apples for some of the main competing countries on the European domestic markets: Morocco, Argentina, Turkey and China. The...

What explains Cambodia’s double digit growth in 2006, 2005, and 2004 of 11%, 13%, and 10%, respectively, despite relatively poor governance (162 out of 179 countries in the 2007 Corruption Perception Index, 151 out of 163 in 2006, 130 out of 158 in 2005 the year in which it was first ranked)?...

Although economic theory seems to be abstract and escapist in some cases, it nevertheless often represents the main tool in order to comprise and describe economic events sytematically. The analysis of every day news in the media clarifies this in the following paper.