The seven-nation Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand is emerging as one of the major subregional groups in Asia. Japan is the second largest trading partner for...

As revealed by the trade intensity indices, India and the People's Republic of China have significant bilateral trade potential, which remains unexplored until now. These countries are presently negotiating for free trade arrangements among them based on their complementarities. This paper makes...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...

We examine the Nash equilibria of a game where two national governments set patent breadth strategically. Broader patents make R&D more attractive, but the effect on static efficiency is nonmonotonic. In a North.South model, where only the North can innovate, harmonization of patent breadth...

We develop a model in which it is uncertainty about the future domestic policy environment that both makes international cooperation attractive and induces the possibility of a nation reneging on such an international agreement. We show, in a fairly general setting in which the likelihood of...

We examine in detail the circumstances under which reciprocity, as defined in Bagwell and Staiger (1999), leads to fixed world prices. We show that a change of tariffs satisfying reciprocity does not necessarily imply constant world prices in a world of many goods and countries. While it is...

The negative effects of climate change on output and productivity have been well documented in recent years. However, its impact on public finances has received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analysing the impact of climate anomalies on fiscal variables in a...

We examine the relationship between inflation and fiscal sustainability with a two-step approach. In the first step, we estimate to estimate a country-specific time-varying measure of fiscal sustainability using the fiscal reaction function. This function captures the response of the primary...

The widening of fiscal deficits during democratic elections is well established. We examine a broader set of fiscal outcomes around elections for a large set of emerging and developing economies (EMDEs), probe for differences between democracies and non-democracies, and estimate the degree to...

The paper looks at the determinants of fiscal adjustments as reflected in the primary surplus of countries. Our conjecture is that governments will usually find it more attractive to pursue fiscal adjustments in a situation of relatively high growth, but based on a simple stylized model of...