International investment agreements (“IIAs”) provide enforceable protections to foreign investors based on the premise that enforceable investor protections will stimulate greater foreign investment flows, which, in turn, are assumed to promote development. However, as understandings of both...

Conventional economic analysis assumes that Central Counterparties (CCPs) may help to reduce systemic risk and avoid future financial crises by mandating the central clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. This view largely goes unchallenged by governments, regulators, practitioners, and...

While intellectual property has long been perceived as a method for protecting, and ultimately valuing, innovation, it is an imperfect measure. With its traditional bias in favor of innovation as delimited by Western views of individuality and technological progress, intellectual property is not...

The contention that “inclusive” institutions are the deep determinants of economic growth remains unsatisfactory. This paper develops an alternative theoretical and empirical case that economic structures are the fundamental cause of economic performance. Economic structures determine the...

This article describes the global coffee market with a focus on the reasons behind the current slump in coffee prices. On the basis of this, the arguments pro and con several possible policy measures are explored

Theodore Roosevelt used the US military to create what he called quot;civilized societies.quot; A growing literature focuses on the economic benefits of empires, benefits sometimes referred to as quot;global public goodsquot;. Some authors, such as Mitchener and Weidenmier (2005) and Ferguson...

Offshoring is usually thought of in the context of globalization and economic activity. Yet a signal feature of the Bush Administration's quot;war on terrorquot; was the offshoring of core security functions. The most famous example is the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, but many...

In His State of the Union Address, President Bush outlined the Advanced Energy Initiative to help break America's dependence on foreign sources of energy. The President has set a national goal of replacing more than 75% of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. With America on the verge...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....