Regulations established for economic agents and policy rules established for governments incorporate distilled wisdom based on (usually unhappy) experience as to what works and what doesn't. At times, however, these rules require action that appears to run contrary to common sense. At the heart...

The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States raises a litany of questions about the future of US trade policy. Canada, along with Mexico, is particularly heavily exposed to trade with the United States and there is considerable speculation about how Canada should react if...

This note seeks to shed light on how economies develop by reconciling the apparent conflict between diversification and specialization as the path to development, and alternative conceptions of an economy as an equilibrium system of optimizing agents versus a driven system dependent on...

Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...

The history of banking crises grows richer with each passing decade, indeed with each passing year. Theories abound: the inherent instability of fractional reserve systems, systemic shocks that overwhelm risk management defenses, myopic optimism, a failure to regulate enough, too much regulation...

This paper provides a thematic summary of a seminar hosted by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Canada, on 17 February 2005. The seminar addressed five themes: (a) the scope and intended benefits of North–South Regional Trade Agreements involving Asia, Africa, and...

Following every major financial debacle (of which we now have had three in the span of a decade – the Asian crisis, the dot-com bubble, and the subprime crisis), all the parties that bear some responsibility for the soundness of financial institutions come under scrutiny – the managers (and...

For some time now, the Bank of Canada has adopted inflation targeting to operationalize its general policy of maintaining price stability in Canada. Inflation targeting has a number of important benefits: it anchors private sector inflation expectations, provides a clear and transparent way to...

"The Money Problem" highlights the role of non-insured, defaultable money equivalents as being at the root of financial panics. It suggests reforms that would establish a banking system similar to today's fractional reserve banking model, but panic-proofed and with much less regulation than is...

As the multilateral trade negotiations launched at Qatar in 2001 reeled from one collapse to another before stalling with no obvious end in sight in 2008, economies seeking new commercial opportunities turned en masse to the pursuit of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs). Indeed...