The desirability of WTO membership for China depends on whether its economic successes have been the result of its discovery of new institutional forms (e.g. dual track pricing, SOE contracts, and fiscal contracts) that are optimal for China's particular economic circumstances, or have been the...

Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive)...

Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can be used as external pressures and credible commitments to overcome opposition and lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians to use international trade agreements to leverage...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

Corruption (the abuse of entrusted authority for illicit gain) is pervasive, hard to measure, and damaging both to economic growth and human rights. Corruption is also intimately associated with trade. However, the international organization governing trade, the WTO, says nothing about...

It is sometimes claimed that free trade agreements (FTAs) between large countries and smaller developing countries serve as "policy anchors" by acting as a mechanism for the smaller developing country to make credible commitments to policy reform which they might not otherwise make. Such policy...

Dieses Paper beschäftigt sich mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen der Wettbewerbspolitik in China und dem WTO-Beitritt. Es wurde festgestellt, dass der WTO-Beitritt zur rechtlichen Verankerung der Wettbewerbspolitik in China wesentlich beigetragen hat. Die chinesische Transformation von der...

Trade policies can promote aggregate efficiency, but the ensuing structural adjustments generally create both winners and losers. From an incomes perspective, trade liberalization can raise GDP per capita, but rates of emergence from poverty depend upon individual household characteristics of...

The paper undertakes a cost-benefit analysis of Afghanistan's accession to the WTO while attempting to shed light on the post-WTO accession challenges. For our empirical analysis we have applied the WITS/SMART model to assess the implication of the WTO membership. A cut in tariffs is the...