International agreements increasingly constrain the ability of governments to use trade policies whereas few constraints apply to the use of investment policies. Using a model in which a local and a foreign firm compete in the domestic market, we analyse whether the foreign firm may be forced to...

Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate into worsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences have proven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization. We examine the actual scope for preference erosion,...

International cooperation is generally driven by a desire to offset a negative spillover imposed by other countries or to help governments to overcome domestic political economy constraints that impede the adoption of welfare enhancing policy changes. In principle, both conditions are satisfied...

This paper first briefly describes the role of the WTO and its history. It then lays out a simple bargaining model of international negotiations, which can be used for understanding the Doha round of talks. This simple framework is used to distil and discuss a number of potential explanations...

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...

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...