Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from trade facilitation—measures to reduce the overall costs of the international movement of goods. From an equity perspective an important question is how those benefits are distributed across and within...

In 2009, the United States imposed additional tariffs for a three-year period on imports of automotive tires from China under a special-safeguard provision included in China’s Protocol of Accession to the WTO. China challenged the measure in the WTO. The case marked the first WTO dispute in...

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...

The share of intra-industry trade (IIT) in total trade between Central and East European nations and the EU is among the highest of all the EU’s bilateral trade flows. IIT is broken down into horizontal and vertical components and the determinants of each is investigated. Vertical IIT...

This paper investigates the activities of the Bulgarian competition office, the Commission for the Protection of Competition, during 1991–5. Descriptive statistics are provided on the industry incidence of investigations, the types of behaviour that were investigated, and the frequency with...

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...