African countries have sought to replicate the success of East Asia by implementing special economic zones. Despite decades of international experience, there remains no blueprint for successful special economic zone policies, and the majority of special economic zones fall well below...

This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the...

As democracy develops and matures, the number of interest groups attempting to voice their interests with respect to trade policies tends to increase, and sometimes governments collide with them in the process of enacting restraints. This paper aims to investigate empirically the role of...

Since the early 1990s, regional trade agreements (RTAs) covering trade in services have proliferated, with 95 RTAs on services notified to the World Trade Organization (WTO) under Article V of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), as of June 2011. This paper discusses how RTAs...

This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the...

Do the services commitments that countries have made in their post-Uruguay Round regional trade agreements (RTAs) indicate the types of concessions that they would be willing to multilateralise in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)? While there are important legal and economic...

More than half of the countries in the world have introduced a reform process in their power sectors and billions of dollars have been spent on liberalizing electricity markets around the world. Ideological considerations, political composition of governments and educational/professional...

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon...

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon...

The dissatisfaction of developing countries with the new Trade Round surfaced first in the WTO meeting in Seattle in autumn 1999. The Round was finally launched in Doha in 2001. Nevertheless, since the, the negotiations has faced with difficulties and deadlocks. The author argues that such...