Almost eight years after the launch of the Doha Round, the WTO negotiations remain mired in a swamp of detail, with many participants unwilling or unable to make the hard decisions which would bring the Round to a conclusion. Meanwhile, the world has changed dramatically with the onset of a...

Is political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with China? The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners' officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with China. We run a gravity model of...

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can increase Chinese soft power and decrease it of potential rivals. As the world is at peace generally, the ability to persuade citizens of other countries is very important. Soft power is measured by Gallup global poll, which judges the performance of leadership...

In this paper, we assess the implications of changes in bilateral diplomatic relations with the United States for economic relations. We identify countries whose relations with the US changed during two historic and significant milestones in the past three decades, and a third group of countries...

Relations of countries with the USA could be considered as helpful in their quest for enhanced economic performance. Does an improvement or deterioration in relations with the USA bring significant economic and financial benefits or costs, in areas such as, trade, capital flows, remittances,...

Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth as a threat. China currently ranks second, or perhaps even first, in the world in gross domestic product (although 78th in per capita GDP), and the fear is that China will acquire military prowess commensurate with its wealth and...

Does China’s quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity...

The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners' officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with China. We run a gravity model of exports to China from 159 partner countries between 1991 and 2008 to test to which...

This paper investigates the effect of trade integration on military conflict. Our empirical analysis,based on a large panel data set of 290,040 country-pair observations from 1950 to 2000, confirms that an increase in bilateral trade interdependence and global trade openness significantly...

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000 - 2011. We...