The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is under serious attack. Some critics blame IMF lending for having contributed to the spreading of financial crises in emerging markets. Consequently, they call for putting an end to IMF lending. This radical proposal rests on the contention that official...

The multilateral trade negotiations in the Uruguay Round have stagnated for years. At the same time, the world economy has witnessed a strong revival of regional trade arrangements. This juxtaposition suggests that major trading partners are drifting away from the GATT. Systemic weaknesses in...

The demand of industrialized countries for a multilateral agreement on investment to be negotiated under the roof of the WTO is meeting with considerable resistance on the part of developing countries. The proponents of such a multilateral agreement argue that binding disciplines of...

Globalization improves the prospects for developing countries (DCs) to catch up economically with industrialized countries. But not all DCs will automatically benefit from globalization. Some DCs even face the risk of being delinked from the international division of labor. Differences in DC...

Globalised markets and production patterns offer favourable opportunities to raise world income. Yet globalisation also fuels conflicts about the distribution of welfare gains within and across countries. Various developing economies are poorly prepared to meet the challenge of fiercer...

It is widely believed that the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has grossly fallen short of high expectations raised by the Bush administration in 2002. From the perspective of potential recipient countries, the crucial issue is whether the MCC increased the overall pool of aid resources...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. On the other hand, new donors (many of which were aid...

Non-traditional source countries of FDI play an increasingly important role, notably in developing host countries. This raises the question of whether the determinants of FDI differ systematically between traditional and non-traditional source countries. We perform Logit and Poisson Pseudo...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as black boxes, despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these...

We focus on investor-state dispute settlement provisions contained in various, though far from all, bilateral investment treaties as a possible determinant of BIT-related effects on bilateral FDI flows. Our estimation results prove to be sensitive to the specification of these provisions as well...