The activities of multinational enterprises drive the economic globalization process to a very large degree. This paper lists some facts about their dominant role in all channels of globalization. Therefore, the importance of multinational enterprises in foreign direct investment and production...

The Millennium Round of MTNs, which was stillborn in Seattle, was supposed to have initiated wide-sweeping changes to the world's trading system. This paper deals with the impact on the German economy of some changes that might have been forthcoming from proposed liberalization strategies. It...

This paper addresses a complex of globalization issues: the effect of globalization on the skill premium; the effect of globalization on unemployment; the relative importance of globalization and exogenous technical change; the effect of globalization on the ability of national governments to...

The paper examines why ‘globaphobia’ seems to be more prevalent among labour in the United States than in Europe. It argues that globalization has generated more wealth, but also more income inequality and adjustment problems, in America than in Europe. In the United States, the median voter...

For Africa, a regional customs union is unlikely to realise net welfare gains (in the sense of trade creation dominating trade diversion) which cannot be attained through unilateral trade liberalization. Unilateral reform has often failed in Africa, however. A regional customs union tied to...

We develop a model where trade liberalization leads to skill-biased technological change, which in turn raises the relative return to skilled labour. As firms get access to a larger market, they have incentives to choose a more skill-intensive technology because a lowering of variable costs...

Transaction costs are a major reason why international trade flows are much smaller than traditional trade theory would suggest. Trust between trading partners lowers transaction costs and may therefore enhance trade. The empirical analysis of this paper shows that more trust leads to more trade...

Does distance matter for the volatility of international real and financial transactions? We show that it does, in addition to its well-established relevance for the level of trade. A simple model of trade with endogenous markups shows that demand shocks have a larger impact on trade between...

This paper traces the links from trade shocks to poverty in developing countries. It considers the determinants of household and individual welfare (including potential differences between household members) and then identifies six trade-to-poverty links: the extent to which prices change and...

This paper has two purposes. It introduces a direct approach to policy analysis in endogenous growth models - the q-theory approach - and uses this to illustrate several new openness-and-growth links that appear when we enrich the economic content of the early trade and growth models. The...