Economists are political philosophers. This claim is defended based on an investigation of normative arguments made in economics textbooks. The paper aims to explain, reconstruct and contest the neoclassical vision implicit in mainstream economic trade theory. Analyzing arguments made by...

The objective of this paper is to analyse what targets and criteria should be followed for electricity transmission investments which would be beneficial for Europe. The paper indicates that there is serious underinvestment in the European transmission network from the overall welfare point of...

The increasing complexity, interdependence and acceleration of global developments, digital media and the growing share of global public goods, have all contributed to the publicitisation, sectoralisation and summitization of foreign policy worldwide. In this context, the Lisbon Treaty since...

The policy reforms initiated in India in the mid-1980s and expanded in 1991 helped support an expansion in India’s trade. Trade reforms since the mid-1990s have been piecemeal. This paper argues that without significant further reform and adoption of a focused trade strategy, the...

How can economic theory be useful in WTO arbitrations? Motivated by this question, this paper reviews the approach that is often used to determine the level of permissible retaliation in international trade disputes (the, so called, "trade effect" approach), and its implementation under specific...

Social contacts influence decisions and economic outputs in a variety of contexts. Does social network matter also in financial markets? In this paper I investigate the effect of social networks on mutual funds performance by exploiting data on the education of U.S. fund managers. The results...

The working paper includes a collection of the case notes written by the national judges who attended the European Networking and Training for National Competition Enforcers (ENTraNCE 2012). The training program was organized by the RSCAS between September 2012 and June 2013 with the financial...

This paper suggests four metaphors to correct our habitual way of thinking about globalization. It begins with the idea that the world can be understood more effectively based on the properties of gases, rather than liquids; secondly, it analyzes the properties and effects of the excessive...

The commonplace tendency is to blame the difficulties of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations on the World Trade Organization (WTO) itself. In contrast, I suggest in the first part of this paper that exogenous structural factors, especially changing commodity prices and trade flows,...