Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

The Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) is the most successful legally binding instrument of the World Customs Organization (WCO) with 156 contracting parties. More and more countries and economic regions are applying the HS nomenclature worldwide. But not all member states...

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,...

This paper provides the first quantitative evidence on the restrictiveness of services policies in 2016 for a sample of developing countries, based on recently released regulatory data collected by the World Bank and WTO. We use machine learning to recreate to a high degree of accuracy the...

This paper examines the relationship between mega-regional trade Agreements and diet-related health given that such Agreements aim to liberalize “substantially all trade and investment” that could potentially impact on health through tariff elimination and stronger intellectual property...

Multinational firms are known to shift profits and countries are known to compete over shifty profits. Two major principles for corporate taxation are Separate Accounting (SA) and Formula Apportionment (FA). These two principles have very different qualities when it comes to preventing profit...

This paper studies the connection between trade and growth in the context of a partial and inconsistent liberalization process in a specific Eastern European country in transition towards market economy, namely, the Republic of Belarus. The analysis of the country trade patterns during the USSR...

The concept of globalization refers to the growing interdependence of countries, resulting from the increasing integration of trade, finance, investments, labor markets and ideas in one globalmarketplace. The most important elements of this process are the international trade and the...

This paper examines the linkages between the trade of goods and financial assets. Do both flows behave as complements (implying a positive correlation) or as substitutes (negative correlation)? Although a classic topic in international macroeconomics, the empirical evidence has remained...

I develop an index for economic integration accounting for its gradual and bilateral nature: the Gradual And Bilateral Integration (GABI) index. The graduality captures differences in the depth and path of five stages in economic integration and is an improvement over the use of binary dummy...