The recent financial crisis has put enormous strains on the global systems governing international finance and trade. These two important international regulatory systems, created after World War II to promote growth and stability in the global economy, were put to the test in ways unprecedented...

Abuse is one of the core issues in EU direct tax matters. Much has been written over the past years. The discussion on the interpretation and application of the different elements of the anti-abuse clauses appears to be settling. However, an equally fascinating discussion appears to be emerging:...

The worldwide trend towards privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation has produced substantial economic benefits. Nevertheless, liberalisation has had its shortcomings and there are potential threats to further progress, including in particular an anti-liberalisation backlash. Continuing...

This paper reviews the most significant recent developments in the theory of trade agreements. The paper offers an integrated approach to evaluating trade agreements, and uses the approach to present results on preferential and multilateral trade agreements. The paper identifies also several...

We examine in detail the circumstances under which reciprocity, as defined in Bagwell and Staiger (1999), leads to fixed world prices. We show that a change of tariffs satisfying reciprocity does not necessarily imply constant world prices in a world of many goods and countries. While it is...

From 1990 to 2010, free trade helped a billion people lift themselves out of extreme poverty. But the pace of liberalisation has since slowed and protectionism is back in fashion. Fortunately, Brexit provides a golden opportunity for the UK to become a global champion of free trade again. This...

Trade liberalization has proceeded on the assumption that eventual aggregate welfare gains will exceed the losses. While compensatory mechanisms exist in most countries, they tend to be underfunded and ineffective. To begin to address this problem, the direct beneficiaries from trade...

The paper studies the effects of regional integration on the incentives of members and non-members to undertake multilateral trade liberalization. Using a three-country political economy model with imperfect competition, it shows how regionalism can undermine support for multilateralism....

This paper examines various implications of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), namely Customs Unions (CUs) and Free Trade Areas (FTAs), in the context of a multi-country general equilibrium model based on comparative advantage considerations. We calibrate the model to represent countries with...

We prove that the normalization rule in Bond and Syropoulos (1996, Journal of International Economics 40, 411-437) that sets the world price of good 1 as the numéraire causes asymmetry in the Nash equilibrium. Such rule contradicts their symmetric assumption when one derives other blocs'...