Neither regional integration nor trade is a welfare or policy objective in itself. If countries are pursuing policies to promote them, this is as a means to improve their welfare. The ultimate objective need not be under a purely economic definition: there is a long history of seeing integration...

Este documento fue comisionado por la Red de Integración y Comercio del Diálogo Regional de Política para la II Reunión Hemisférica celebrada los días 22 y 23 de mayo de 2001. Ni la integración regional ni el comercio son, en sí mismos, objetivos de bienestar o de política económica....

In the last decade, regionalism appears to have emerged as a major new force in the world. This book puts it in its historical context. Regions have emerged before; few are old because they either evolve into federal systems or break up. The current regions imply more integration than a simple...

<ul> <li>Chinese Taipei; Hong Kong, China; Korea and Singapore (the East Asian Newly Industrialised Countries or NICs) have been successful in attaining income convergence with high-income countries while Latin American countries remain caught in the Middle-Income Trap.</li> <li>The East Asian NICs pursued...</li></ul>

<ul> <li>There is no unique model of reform for infrastructure that is equally applicable to all countries.</li> <li>Fixed-line privatisation has often failed due to weak economic and institutional endowments.</li> <li>Governments and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) should consider alternative options to...</li></ul>

<ul><li>ASEAN countries should play a more active role in the international standard-setting process for carbon labelling.</li> <li>Fragmented, bottom-up approaches to carbon labelling may lead to a proliferation of different labelling schemes, acting as a constraint to ASEAN exports.</li> <li>Carbon labelling should be...</li></ul>

This paper reviews the literature and contributes with some evidence based on the World Values Survey on the drivers of tax morale around the world, with an emphasis on developing countries. It shows that socio-economic factors such as age, religion, gender, employment status and educational...

Poverty is typically measured in different ways in developing and advanced countries. The majority of developing countries measure poverty in absolute terms, using a poverty line determined by the monetary cost of a predetermined basket of goods. In contrast, most analyses of poverty in advanced...

Using the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) from the OECD Development Centre, this paper provides evidence of the two-way relationship between gender inequality in social institutions and South-South migration. Discriminatory social institutions in both origin and destination countries...