Especially with the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, Asian countries have advocated a profound reform of the international financial architecture. Their proposals focused on two main axes: a reform of the global financial system and stronger regional monetary integration in Asia. There are...

This paper explores the impact of the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) agreement on food security by using a gravity model to examine the regional changes in trade in agricultural products. This is followed by a discussion of how this might affect the four dimensions of food security,...

We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

For a very long time, the areas available for continuous long-distance trade were limited to territories the size of Braudel's Mediterranée (1949). Whatever the commercial organizations (merchants in the Roman or the Fatimid Empires, the Hanseatic League, the Florentine Companies), their trade...

The Belt Road Initiative (BRI) suggested by China’s President Xi Jinping provides an ambitious vision encouraging a new level of cooperation among countries along several economic corridors spanning most of the Asian economies member of ESCAP. This paper reviews the trade and trade...

Economic projections for the world economy, particularly in relation to the construction of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) baselines, are generally rather conservative and take scant account of the wide range of possible evolutions authorized by the underlying economic mechanisms...

The People's Republic of China experienced a tremendous economic development within the last four decades. The increased economic power and political weight of China are challenging the USA and EU. Furthermore, the strategies used by China for its own development, e.g. broad-based industry...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a Chinese endeavor to create an international public good (IPG) for bringing a cooperative solution to existing infrastructure deficits, mainly in the Eurasian landmass. This article aims to question the institutional quality of the BRI as a global...

The European Union has recently shifted to a trade policy that envisages a greater use of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). In particular the EU is working on a number of new FTA initiatives. Policy statements also reiterate the EU's commitment to multilateralism in trade and to the completion of...

Trade policy in Asia has switched from non-discriminatory unilateral liberalisation, reinforced by GATT/ WTO commitments, to discriminatory FTAs. The paper surveys the FTA activity of the major regional players: China, India, the ASEAN countries, Japan and South Korea. It concludes that emerging...