Services offshoring is on the rise. Due to recent innovations in communication technologies, many services that used to be non-tradable can be delivered from distance today. Still, German services imports have grown much slower than exports over the past decades, indicating under-exploitation of...

Bilateral and regional cooperation initiatives in Asia have been growing in importance over the last five years. These accords span the real and financial sectors; rather than following the more typical pattern of “trade first, money later”, recent policy initiatives involve the simultaneous...

The implications of national security related procedures for trade flows at border points in OECD countries has become a major topic of commentary in popular press. We discuss whether the economic costs of border delays are represented solely by time spent in awaiting processing. This has been...

This paper presents numerical simulation results that suggest that China can both reduce its trade imbalance and receive welfare benefits by switching the value added tax (VAT) regime from the current destination principle to an origin principle. With the tax on exports exceeding that no longer...

Debates over economic policy tend to be enormously confused. It is often the case that even high-level officials and well-known economists seem ignorant of basic accounting identities. This leads them to make claims that literally do not add up. This seems to be especially common in the case of...

Broadly defined as credit intermediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system,1 shadow banking raises important policy concerns. Given significant challenges with data availability, the size, nature and significance of shadow banking in emerging market and...

The Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations has been ongoing for 10 years, and given political cycles in major countries, there is not much hope for a rapid conclusion. The topics on the table are important, and in principle there is enough substance for all countries to...

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

This paper takes a careful look at a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) Working Paper that claims to find significant gains for liberalization of trade through the World Trade Organization. It is not clear that the reported gains are at all large. The IMF paper shows that multilateral...

Countries embarking on trade negotiations are not only seeking increased market access, but also, reduced market opacity. This study distils the most progressive practices for promoting regulatory transparency in over one hundred regional trade agreements (RTAs) concluded by OECD and large...