In spite of their growing importance in international trade as well as in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, services have only attracted limited attention from researchers interested in determinants of trade policies and trade cooperation. This paper seeks to account for countries'...

This paper draws from different approaches within the field of international political economy to try to explain why governments undertook different levels of market access commitments under the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The argument, which is supported by empirical...

In spite of their growing importance in international trade as well as in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, services have only attracted limited attention from researchers interested in determinants of trade policies and trade cooperation. This paper seeks to account for countries'...

A high degree of de facto judicial Independence (JI) functions as a crucial precondition of governments to credibly commit to legislative decisions, such as respecting private property rights. Thus, de facto JI should improve the allocative efficiency and may therefore contribute positively to...

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transfirmational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries&' formal institutions (e.g., political...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

According to an influential theoretical argument, presidential systems tend to present smaller governments because the separation between those who decide the size of the fiscal purse and those who allocate it creates incentives for lower public expenditures. In practice, forms of government...

In this paper, we argue that the answer to the question of whether the impact of corruption on development is homogenous, is no. Our optimism rest on how development may be conceptualised. When equated to a narrow measure in economic-wise which fundamentally ignores critical issues, then there...

This paper examines myopic, populist policies that guarantee short-term financial protection of the people from the elite without regard for long-term fiscal or monetary distortions. Assuming that citizens are financially heterogeneous, this paper shows that inefficient outcomes can arise when...