This article discusses the place of both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) and their role in global energy governance in the light of the fragmentation debate roughly twenty years after their establishment. The Energy Charter Secretariat (ECS), the...

The fact that crossing a political border dramatically reduces trade flows has been widely documented in the literature. The increasing number of borders has surprisingly attracted much less attention. The number of independent countries has indeed risen from 72 in 1948 to 192 today. This paper...

The new international trade theory has shown that trade among countries does not necessarily depend on international differences in technology and factor endowments. Instead, trade is the result of the exploitation of scale economies and scope economies, and more concretely of the migration of...

It has been widely argued that, with the decline in trade costs (e.g., transport and communication costs), the importance of distance has declined over time. This paper examines the evolution of the geographic profile of countries' trade by studying the evolution of their distance of trade (DOT)...

It has been widely argued that, with the decline in trade costs, the importance of distance has declined over time. On the other hand, most gravity models find that the importance of distance on bilateral trade has increased over time. This puzzle is examined here. The paper develops a new...

The fact that crossing a political border dramatically reduces trade flows has been widely documented in the literature. The increasing number of borders has surprisingly attracted much less attention. The number of independent countries has indeed risen from 72 in 1948 to 192 today. This paper...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...

Long-run cross-country price data exhibit a puzzle. Today, richer countries exhibit higher price levels than poorer countries, a stylized fact usually attributed to the Balassa- Samuelson effect. But looking back fifty years, this effect virtually disappears from the data. What is often assumed...

The paper examines the rise fall and rise of the Liberal International Economic Order over the last 150 years, and critically examines the various hopes and fears in developed and developing countries that this most recent global integration is raising

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is making moves to get into the world of Internet governance. Many haven't heard of the ITU, and this essay provides some historical background by first looking at the events that took place 100 years ago at the time of the sinking of the Titanic....