Tax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of which...

This study is motivated by frequent calls to harmonize labor standards across countries, which result from the fear that economic integration (and the accompanying liberalization of trade flows) will lead to an erosion of working conditions, as countries deliberately try to reduce labor...

Recent trade negotiations, both at the regional and multilateral level, have seen a resurgence of the issue of trade and labour standards. As the world economy becomes increasingly globalised and the volume of world trade flows keeps increasing between the North and the South, it is very likely...

The paper considers the trade and wages debate, and proposes two alternative explanations to explain the rising wage differential (relative wage of the skilled vs. the unskilled), other than the conventional Stolper-Samuelson explanation. The first is an explanation dubbed kaleidoscopic...