More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

Digital technology has penetrated various fields, including international trade. This study aims to analyze how barriers/openness to trade in digital services affected exports before the COVID-19 pandemic (2015-2016) and during the pandemic (2019-2020). Based on the Gravity model, exports seem...

The Second Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) will be hosted by the University of Barcelona and its IELPO LL.M. Programme at the premises of the University of Barcelona from the 8th July to 10th July 2010.Over the course of the last two decades, the...

Earlier research showed that during the 1980s and 1990s most of the global agricultural trade expansion took place among the industrial countries and among countries within trade blocs. These were also periods of declining agricultural prices. These prices increased during the 2000s, there were...

A pivotal factor to improving the economies of developing countries is to eliminate trade barriers and increase market access. This paper examines efforts at liberalizing trade in developing countries. It explains the various multilateral trade agreements and negotiations and analyses their...

This paper challenges the main stream narrative that links the strength and speed of the world trade collapse in 2008-9 to (i) lacking trade finance, (ii) international value chains and (iii) ‘murky' protectionism. The paper discusses the emerging literature and points out counteracting forces...

The paper puts the collapse of the world trade volume in 2009 into two historic perspectives. First, the paper analyses 18 major post-1980/pre-2007 financial crises and uses these observations as a basis to critically evaluate presently available projections for world trade. Second, the paper...