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...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

It is generally agreed that privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) improves economic efficiency, but it is also widely feared that it exacerbates unemployment especially in transition and development economies. This paper proposes a theoretical model of the macroeconomic relationships...

The impact of FDI onto host countries economies is heavily debated, particularly for transition economies. However, sectoral research is scarce. Building on Aristotelous and Fountas (1996) and using data from automobile manufacturers associations (OICA and ACEA), we analyze the impact of...