Trade and investment can be effective means of implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. However, stand-alone trade and investment liberalization policies aimed at enhancing economic development may have negative side-effects on non-economic facets of sustainable development. As...

The Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA) embodies the first set of new multilateral rules to have been negotiated under auspices of the WTO, part of a small package of decisions centering on matters of interest to developing countries that was “harvested” from the broader Doha round. This...

This paper surveys the recent literature on Arab economic integration, discusses the goals and progress that has been made to date and some of the key policy, regulatory and political factors that underpin the segmentation of Arab markets. It argues that there has been an excessive focus by both...

In light of the spread of Covid-19 cases in India during the second wave, the Government of India (GOI) decided to negotiate for an IPR waiver under section 1 (copyright and related rights), 4 (industrial designs), 5 (patents), and 7 (protection of undisclosed information) of TRIPS Agreement...

This paper first briefly describes the role of the WTO and its history. It then lays out a simple bargaining model of international negotiations, which can be used for understanding the Doha round of talks. This simple framework is used to distil and discuss a number of potential explanations...

In the first half of the 1990s many Central and East European countries (CEECs) experienced very high growth rates of exports to OECD nations. This paper investigates the contribution of sources of comparative advantage and economic restructuring on the pattern, composition and volume of trade....

This study estimates the effect of trade facilitation measures implementation on trade costs in Asia and the Pacific using data from the United Nations Global Survey on Trade Facilitation and Paperless Trade Implementation. Impact of different sets of measures are considered, from a basic set of...

This paper analyses a number of the challenges confronting developing countries seeking to use the WTO Doha negotiations to promote their economic growth and performance. A precondition for success is to have clear objectives and to take a proactive stance. But a key necessary condition for...

In this paper, we review the sustainable development content of regional trade agreements (RTAs) globally using a new ESCAP RTA Text Analysis tool, followed by a comparative analysis of sustainable development related provisions in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and two...

Rules on digital trade are rapidly taking shape as countries in Asia-Pacific and beyond strive to secure the benefits associated with e-commerce and the digitalization of trade in goods and services. At the multilateral level, the WTO holds promise to reach a plurilateral agreement on core...