The World Trade Organization's voluntary rules on government procurement are a useful mechanism for ensuring that public procurement procedures are efficient. They also provide an opportunity to reduce the uncertainty of participants by increasing transparency and accountability. Yet most...

This paper surveys the literature on trade in services, focusing on the policies that are used to restrict such trade, the gains from liberalization, and the institutional mechanisms that have been adopted in the pursuit of liberalization. It argues that technological progress and international...

Firm-level data for the Czech Republic during 1992–6 suggest that foreign investment has tended to flow to firms of above average size, initial profitability and initial labour productivity. After controlling for this selection bias, we find that foreign investment has a positive, but...

This Paper focuses on policies facilitating firm adjustment to globalization. We briefly review the effects of trade and investment liberalization on firms, focusing on within- industry effects. We postulate that governments’ role in supporting the process is to: (i) ensure that firms face...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm restructuring and international competition in Bulgaria during 1991–4. Two hypotheses are tested. First, firms in industries that are subject to significant international competition demonstrate greater increases in efficiency over time...

The authors analyze the new Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) that was negotiated between a subset of General Agreement on Tariffs an Trade (GATT) members in the Uruguay Round, focusing especially on the expansion of coverage to services and on the strengthening of enforcement mechanisms....

In this paper, developed as part of the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Sourcebook, the authors examine how to implement trade liberalization as part of a strategy for alleviating poverty in developing countries. They discuss trade policy instruments, institutions, complementary...

In the first half of the 1990s exports to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from many Central and Eastern European countries grew rapidly. The authors explore the extent that export growth reflects economic restructuring and changes in trade composition as...