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 global health crisis that came to be known as the COVID-19 pandemic and started to sweep across the world in early 2020 revealed many vulnerabilities in the economic, social, and political fabric underpinning what much of the world had come to accept as normal. In ways that we are still...

Timely and equitable access to vaccines and other health technologies is vital in effectively responding to pandemics and treating other communicable diseases. This paper shows how countries might overcome real or purported intellectual property (IP) barriers to regional COVID-19 vaccine...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of national, regional, and global vaccine research and development (R&D) systems. Translating public and private R&D efforts into effective vaccines in a timely manner requires not only sufficient financial and scientific...

Trade costs matter, in particular for small island developing countries, such as Pacific island Countries (PICs), given their economic size and remoteness from the world markets. This paper examines whether PICs' performance in cross-border trade costs is informed by the extent of their...

This paper develops a simple small-country model to explain why the World Trade Organization (WTO) prohibits export subsidies but allows import tariffs. Governments choose protection rates (import tariffs/export subsidies) to maximize a weighted sum of social welfare and lobbying contributions....

This working paper introduces the concept of bilateral asymmetries in international merchandise trade statistics (IMTS), i.e. the discrepancies that can be seen in reported bilateral trade flows between trading partners. Such discrepancies mean that the value of exports reported by one country...

The present study works out the relative benefits/losses of India aligning with RCEP and BRICS member countries under the conjecture of free trade area in good trade only. The study uses partial (SMART model) and general equilibrium (GTAP model) tools for this assessment. The main focus in the...

This paper offers a review, analysis and assessment of the status of services liberalization in North and Central Asia. Following a brief introduction about the region and its economic context, this study provides an overview of the binding commitments undertaken by transition economies under...

In many developing countries, the health-care sector is under-developed, lacking basic infrastructure and human capital, and attracting little attention from investors and policymakers. While encouraging globalization and trade may aggravate those problems and create additional costs in some...