The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) has been hailed as a fundamental aspect of the Multilateral Trading System for developing countries. At the same time developing countries face many challenges to ensure their effective participation in the mechanism. This paper presents statistical...

This paper aims to provide a pragmatic policy approach to countering China's influence on trade and investment in the west. It also examines how the United States should address China's ever-growing threat to regional rights, freedoms, trade, security and democracy

This paper analyses and assesses the track record and effectiveness of the so-called “Principles for Stable Capital Flows and Fair Debt Restructuring in Emerging Markets”, which have emerged as an important instrument for crisis prevention and crisis resolution in the international financial...

The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) has been hailed as a fundamental aspect of the Multilateral Trading System for developing countries. At the same time developing countries face many challenges to ensure their effective participation in the mechanism. This paper presents statistical...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going asfar as bringing about regime change. While these interventions may have been considered successful from the US perspective, it is less clear what the economic and political consequences were for the...

The allocation of resources to defence and national security is influenced by several factors, both domestic and external. Empirical findings suggest that military spending is determined by economic, strategic, political, and security factors. Studies that estimate demand functions for such...

Using SIPRI’s new consistent database on military expenditures, the paper examines the economic effects of such spending in the case of the 13 Latin American countries. Employing both linear and nonlinear tests, the nexus between defence spending, economic growth, and investment is...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms - privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...