China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

This paper tries to assess quantitatively the role of electronic commerce in economic activity and in trade and tariff revenue collection. The share of value added that potentially lends itself to electronic trade represents around 30 percent of GDP, most importantly distribution, finance and...

The purpose of the paper is to discuss the effects of WTO accession on policy-making and institutional reforms in transition countries. This is done by looking at the experience of those transition countries which are already Members of the WTO. We start by examining the effect of accession on...

This paper investigates the relationship between export market shares and relative unit labour costs using a long panel of twelve manufacturing industries across fourteen OECD countries. We ask two questions: (a) how sensitive are export market shares to changes in relative costs and (b) what...

This paper presents new econometric specifications for the Brazilian exports in the period 1995-2009 using data from the Quarterly Accounts and allowing for nonlinearities. In the cointegrating vector, there is evidence of a level shift, but the elasticities have not changed significantly. The...

This paper shows new econometric estimates for the Brazilian function of aggregate imports. Besides the basic relation, which includes income and relative price and identifies a demand equation (canonic model), we explore the pronounced co-movements between total imports, household consumption...

Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest producer and exporter of cocoa beans, it accounts for 40% of the WAEMU's output, and 11% of its population are immigrant workers. Any political instability in the country will not only affect the domestic economy, but it will also affect the international...

Host country governments often grant investment incentives to foreign firms locating in their territories. We show that such preferential treatment of foreign firms can facilitate transfer of foreign technology, induce entry by the local firm, and increase host country welfare. However, this...

Antidumping (AD) petitions are often withdrawn in favor of VERs and price undertakings. We compare foreign firms' incentive to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI) under a VER and a price undertaking, with special emphasis on foreign rivalry. We show that a VER is less likely to induce FDI...

With the America Invents Act of 2011, the U.S. changed its patent-issuing rule from first-to-invent to first-to-file, the international norm. We investigate the effect of such a policy change in a two-country model of R&D competition for two sequential (basic and final) inventions. We find that...