There is vast literature on both harmonization and globalization. Much of the extensive commentary, at least in the United States, is outward looking. It focuses on how other countries have changed, or should change, their laws and legal culture to more fully participate in the global economy...

This paper discusses the pitfalls of trade protectionism and argues the case for free trade. An extensive bibliography on trade is also included, which has links to more than 100 articles on various aspect of trade

Global regulations, such as social and environmental standards, often result from project-based multi-stakeholder initiatives. Many initiatives fail because key stakeholders cannot be mobilized, or partners are incapable of establishing common ground. We show that local development projects...

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions...

This article discusses the place of both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) and their role in global energy governance in the light of the fragmentation debate roughly twenty years after their establishment. The Energy Charter Secretariat (ECS), the...

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

With increasing integration and complexity in the digital markets, the absence of multilateral competition law and regulations has, to some degree, contributed to rising trade tensions among major trade partners. China's globalism, characterized by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is still...

The United States stood virtually alone when it enacted its first antitrust statute in 1890. Today, almost all nations have adopted competition laws (the term used in most other nations), and US antitrust agencies interact with foreign enforc-ers on a daily basis. This globalization of antitrust...

The rise of global supply chains has had profound effects on individual economies and the global trading system, thereby complicating standard macroeconomic analyses. For many of the new and challenging questions brought about by this phenomenon, such as its impact on the global business cycle...

We construct a new database which covers production and trade in 136 primary commodities and 24 manufacturing and service sectors for 145 countries. Using this new more granular data, we estimate spillover effects from plausible trade fragmentation scenarios in a new multi-country, multi-sector,...