The People's Republic of China (PRC)'s current account surplus, its growing foreign exchange reserves, and its shifting policies on exchange rate adjustment have become a central preoccupation of United States (US) trade policy. The paper considers the evolving political economy of the US policy...

When the European Union imposed a ban on the import of seal products, Canada and Norway challenged that ban at the World Trade Organization. This paper analyzes the issues and reasoning in the 2013 Dispute Settlement Panel decision, with some attention to the Appellate Body decision that...

At a moment when a global effort to pursue a development-oriented trade round seems to have stalled, some of the largest economies in international trade have turned their attentions to regional accords. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership cover...

This paper explores the ways in which macroeconomic imbalances have driven policy discussions between the United States (US) and People's Republic of China (PRC) in the last decade. The PRC's current account surplus, its growing foreign exchange reserves, and its shifting policies on exchange...

This paper provides a rough test of a broad and prominent class of political economy of trade models and finds them wanting. The class features governments with weighted social welfare functions, including the prominent model of Grossman and Helpman. Whether the government is the single domestic...

In this paper we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights. We analyze new survey data from Ecuador, where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property. The latter come from a variety of sources, including the activity of a local boss,...

This paper considers the economic sanctions that were applied in the mid-1980s to pressure the South African government to end apartheid. It asks what role those sanctions played in the eventual demise of the apartheid regime and concludes that the role was probably very small. An alternative...

The compliance Appellate Body decision marks the latest twist in the long-running EC-Fasteners dispute. The question before the AB is whether the European Union complied with earlier rulings on its antidumping procedures. Broadly, the AB found that the EU had not, generally ruling in favor of...