This paper uses the World Bank database on deep trade agreements to demonstrate the rapid increase in preferential trade agreements with standards of intellectual property protection that are enforceable and elevated beyond the minimums required in the World Trade Organization Trade-Related...

Policy makers around the world recognize the potentially harmful consequences of trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy. Indeed, many countries have recently initiated policy reforms to strengthen the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). Further, minimum standards of...

There has been increasing use of technical regulations as instruments of commercial policy in the context of multilateral, regional, and global trade. These nontariff barriers are of special concern to developing countries, which may bear additional costs in meeting mandatory standards. Many...

The point of parallel imports of pharmaceuticals is arbitrage between countries with different prices. For several years, an important issue in the European Union (EU) has been the evident conflict between differing price regulations in the member states, on the one hand, and the consequences of...

The authors consider how service liberalization differs from goods liberalization in terms of welfare, the level and composition of output, and factor prices within a developing economy, in this case Tunisia. Despite recent movements toward liberalization, Tunisian service sectors remain largely...

The impact of international students and skilled immigration in the United States on innovative activity is estimated using a model of idea generation. In the main specification a system of three equations is estimated, where dependent variables are total patent applications, patents awarded to...

Standards and technical regulations exist to protect consumer safety or to achieve other goals, such as ensuring the interoperability of telecommunications systems, for example. Standards and technical regulations can, however, raise substantially both start-up and production costs for firms....

The authors analyze national and international policy options to encourage the international transfer of technology, distinguishing between four major channels of such transfer: trade in products, trade in knowledge, foreign direct investment, and intra-national and international movement of...