The paper discusses the relevance of past concerns about trade and foreign direct investment diversion to the detriment of Asian suppliers and hosts as a result of EU integration deepening and widening in the nineties. Based on recent empirical evidence, these concerns are rejected. As concerns...

The paper discusses the pros and cons of a Transatlantic free trade area (TAFTA) against the concept of an informal trade-facilitating marketplace between Europe and the US. It finds considerably more cons expecially since TAFTA would be expected to have ever more discriminatory effects to the...

The paper discusses similarities and differences between past EU binding internal liberalization "across the board" in the industrial sector and present so-called voluntary sectoral liberalization of member states of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). While both approaches are...

The paper applies an index suggested by Jeffrey Frankel on how to measure the gap between the intensity of national versus international transactions of a country to more than 100 countries over four periods between 1990 and 2005. The gap stands for "incomplete" globalization. It is shown that...

The paper analyses sectoral patterns of intra-Asian trade for selected Asian countries as well as for sub-regions within Asia. Beyond a general trend towards manufactures, it reveals remarkable differences in specialisation profiles between lagging South Asian countries still concentrating on...

As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...

The paper departs from the perception that trade in services in general and developing countries' exports in services in particular are dynamic segments of world trade. Both total trade data as well as US import trade figures do not support this perception. Success episodes such as the recent...