The Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO recognizes the need for positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries and especially the least developed among them secure a share in the growth in international trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development.This...

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...

Over the past months, it has become increasingly clear that the services negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda will not produce significant improvements on current commitments unless major new impetus is provided. In an introductory section, this paper discusses various impediments,...

Discussions about international capital movements raise extremely important and controversial questions. Why should countries open up their capital accounts, especially considering that unrestricted international capital movement is a relatively new phenomenon? For example, many OECD countries...

Management of capital inflows has unexpectedly become a major challenge in transition economies. These countries were expected to have an insatiable demand for foreign capital, and an excess demand for capital inflows was, therefore, predicted by most observers. Foreign investors are also known...

This study provides a decomposition of the WTO Global Trade Costs Index into five policy-relevant components: transport and travel costs; information and transaction costs; ICT connectedness; trade policy and regulatory differences; and governance quality. The WTO Global Trade Costs Index is...

In this paper, we investigate tourism-related policy approaches that WTO member countries adopted in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. We highlight the need for stakeholders to coordinate their responses in order to mitigate the negative crisis effects and better prepare the sector for the...

We investigate to what extent the probability that a Specific Trade Concern (STC) is raised in the WTO against a Member in a given sector is affected by past reductions in applied tariffs. Employing an identification strategy based on “new measures”, we find evidence of a substitution of...

This study analyses the role of Aid for Trade in reducing trade costs in least developed countries (LDCs). The analysis builds on questionnaires and case stories submitted as part of the Aid-for-Trade monitoring and evaluation exercise for the Fifth Global Review of Aid for Trade. Trade costs...