Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can be used as external pressures and credible commitments to overcome opposition and lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians to use international trade agreements to leverage...

This paper explores the economic impacts of Korean unification on North and South Korea. It presents a new consistent database on macroeconomic, sectoral and trade data, and an input output table for the North Korean economy, and then incorporates it in a global intertemporal multi-sector...

This paper considers how sanctions affected the Iranian economy using a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. It finds sanctions to have significant effects on exchange rates, inflation, and output growth, with the Iranian rial over-reacting to sanctions,...

On 4 August 2015, after three years and several rounds of negotiation, the European Union – Vietnam Free Trade Agreement officially established principles for the basic content of the Agreement. This study aims to analyse impact of Vietnam-EU FTA on bilateral trade of Vietnam. By using a...

This paper considers how sanctions affected the Iranian economy using a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. It finds sanctions to have significant effects on exchange rates, inflation, and output growth, with the Iranian rial over-reacting to sanctions,...

Besides facilitating access to the world market, WTO accession negotiations entail a process of domestic reforms that are expected to improve the supply side of acceding economies. However, measuring the actual impact of accession remains an empirical debate. The present paper contributes to the...

The paper undertakes a cost-benefit analysis of Afghanistan's accession to the WTO while attempting to shed light on the post-WTO accession challenges. For our empirical analysis we have applied the WITS/SMART model to assess the implication of the WTO membership. A cut in tariffs is the...

During the reform era, the Chinese government has been carrying out strategic industrial policies modelled on those in post-war Japan and South Korea, in the hope of transforming its highly fragmented manufacturing sector into one that comprises a small number of internationally competitive big...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on firms' product and labor market power. We estimate the prevalence and intensity of firm-level price-cost markups and either wage markups or wage markdowns. We take the dependence between these model-consistent measures of product and...