Since the fostering of trade liberalization in the 1990s, conventional trade barriers, such as tariffs, have been dropping steadily worldwide. Under the WTO regime, member countries are unable to impose higher tariff rates than the bound rates, and the effective tariff rates have been decreasing...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....