Plurilateral agreements in the WTO context allow sub-sets of countries to agree to commitments in specific policy areas that only apply to signatories, and thus allow for ‘variable geometry’ in the WTO. Current WTO rules make it much more difficult to pursue the plurilateral route than to...

This paper discusses the Fedon case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which involved a claim for compensation by Fedon (an Italian producer of eye glass cases) from the EU for the imposition of WTO-authorized retaliatory trade barriers by the United States following the failure by the...

The Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA) embodies the first set of new multilateral rules to have been negotiated under auspices of the WTO, part of a small package of decisions centering on matters of interest to developing countries that was “harvested” from the broader Doha round. This...

This paper studies whether political campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in the United States in the manner suggested by the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994), using a detailed cross-sectional data set of agricultural protection, subsidies, and...

Services have become increasingly prominent on the international policy agenda since the early 1980s. Very little information exists on how and why international transactions in services occur, however. This paper discusses a number of the problems confronting governments interested in...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a landmark in terms of creating multilateral disciplines in virgin territory, but is a failure in terms of generating liberalization and locking-in existing policy regimes affecting international transactions in services. There are two key...

The effects on national welfare and on market access of two public procurement practices, discrimination and non-transparency, are examined. Both policies have become prominent in international trade negotiations, such as the ongoing Doha Round of WTO trade talks. Our analysis shows that...

This paper explores options for governments of Central and East European countries to increase the sensitivity of competition law enforcement to trade and investment policy, thereby supporting a liberal trade policy stance. The competition laws of these countries tend to resemble European Union...

This paper explores to what extent the magnitude and speed of the contagion effects that materialized in East Asia in the second half of 1997 may have had "real" underpinnings, in the sense that the pattern of production, consumption and trade increased the vulnerability of East Asian countries...