A comprehensive inventory of bilateral FTAs on a global scale, with sections on Africa and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. It highlights the key points of each agreement, and details planned future developments. Background paper prepared for the...

This paper assesses the impact of India’s unilateral tariff reductions and lowering of quantitative restrictions since 1991. It then evaluates the WTO commitments on nonagricultural market access in the light of these reductions. This short paper based on hard quantitative analysis is a...

Much more than comparative advantage and free markets have been at play in shaping China's export success. Government policies have helped nurture domestic capabilities in consumer electronics and other advanced areas that would most likely not have developed in their absence. As a result, China...

This article analyses the importance of international commercial service transactions relating to both trade and investment, which form an essential element of analyzing production fragmentation and economic integration in Asia. Following an aggregative analysis the authors discusses data...

The EU Commission argues that radical changes to he origin rules will both simplify processes and make them more development friendly. Will they? There are different opinions on what Rules of Origin should achieve – which complicates the task of setting the right level. A substantial...

Taking into account the latest data of exports of textiles and clothing to the European Union from South Asia and China, a year-end assessment of the impact of the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) introduced by the EU in January last. Despite loss of GSP benefit on textiles, Indian...

Policy makers are particularly concerned about the extent and speed of exchange rate pass-through into domestic prices. However, in recent times there seems to be a growing degree of disconnect between exchange rate changes and domestic consumer prices in general, or, for that matter, even into...

The September 2007 annual summit of APEC to be hosted by Australia will witness the ending of the decade long moratorium on membership. A major anomaly of the APEC is that while the three largest economies in the world in terms of PPP GDP are members (US, China and Japan), the fourth largest...

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) will be an integral and significant part of global financial and capital markets even in the medium term. It is important for India to put in place domestic safeguards against the investments by the SWF in order to retain technological and policy autonomy, and...

The paper reviews the experience of select countries - both advanced and emerging markets - in regard to capital account liberalisation (CAL). The advanced countries' experience with regard to CAL is analysed with special focus on the sequencing of CAL. The move towards CAL by many of the...