The global economic crisis has led to a massive increase in unemployment, and nearly all governments have declared the protection of domestic jobs to be a central economic policy aim. In the US, an additional $790-billion economic stimulus package was adopted immediately after President Obama...

Almost eight years after the launch of the Doha Round, the WTO negotiations remain mired in a swamp of detail, with many participants unwilling or unable to make the hard decisions which would bring the Round to a conclusion. Meanwhile, the world has changed dramatically with the onset of a...

Internet is a global market place. The rapid development of the Internet, and especially of Internet-based commerce, has largely taken place outside the standard trade-regulatory frameworks that cover most other forms of cross-border commerce. As the size of the Internet markets has grown, and...

Is political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with China? The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners' officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with China. We run a gravity model of...

To date, government procurement has been effectively carved out of the main multilateral rules of the WTO system. This paper examines the systemic and other ramifications of this exclusion, from both an economic and a legal point of view. In addition to relevant elements of the WTO Agreements,...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is broader in policy coverage than conventional trade agreements for goods and, at the same time, offers governments more flexibility, in various dimensions, to tailor their obligations to sector- or country-specific needs. An overview of...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in...

I propose a framework within which to interpret and evaluate the major reforms introduced to the GATT system in its transition to the WTO. In particular, I examine the WTO Agreement on Safeguards that has replaced the GATT escape clause (Article XIX), and the Dispute Settlement Process (DSP)...