Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can be used as external pressures and credible commitments to overcome opposition and lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians to use international trade agreements to leverage...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...

This paper examines the progress of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform in the People's Republic of China. After defining SOEs and considering their scope of operation within the PRC economy, the focus of the paper is on the major reform waves that followed the deterioration of SOE profitability...

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

Dieses Paper beschäftigt sich mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen der Wettbewerbspolitik in China und dem WTO-Beitritt. Es wurde festgestellt, dass der WTO-Beitritt zur rechtlichen Verankerung der Wettbewerbspolitik in China wesentlich beigetragen hat. Die chinesische Transformation von der...

A multilateral currency union removes the intraregional exchange rates but not the union rate variability with the rest of the world. The intraregional exchange rate variability is thus latent. A two-step procedure is developed to measure the variability. The measured variables are used to model...

EU and twelve countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) engaged in 1995 in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) in political, economic and cultural matters with the aim to foster cooperation, stability, and prosperity around the Mediterranean Basin. The Economic and Financial...

We investigate changes in Asia's regional and global trade linkages and their influence on macroeconomic relationships among Asia, Europe, and United States (US). We first document changes in trade patterns of East Asia, Europe, and US and discuss stylized facts about East Asia's trade...

We develop a new concept of rural technology diffusion influenced by labor mobility and business relations. The technology gain effect of labor mobility increases technology diffusiveness, whereas the technology drain effect decreases it. The concept is applied to survey data from the Mekong...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...