The place of agriculture in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) prior to 1986 is usually described in terms of either exclusion or exemption from general trading rules. This paper reevaluates the ‘exemption’ argument and its corollary that the Uruguay Round Agreement on...

In December 2005, the European Council agreed a Financial Perspective for 2007-2013. This reduced significantly planned EU spending compared with the Commission proposal. Morover, if effectively redistributed net funds from new poorer member states to old richer members. This paper charts the...

The Uruguay Round Agreement made significant changes to the governance of international trade. Trade rules and dispute settlement mechanisms were altered and a series of specific agreements provided for liberalisation across economic sectors. The Agreement on Agriculture, arguably the most...

Current arguments in Australia concerning horizontal fiscal equalisation may help inform the debate in the United Kingdom concerning possible changes to the Barnett formula and the establishment of financial relations with any regional governments in England. Although Australia is a...

Government procurement policy in the UK is an uneasy mixture of different policy legacies, where the dominant objectives of cost-efficiency and value for money compete with alternatives which emphasise public procurement as central to innovation policy and/or a critical demand-side instrument in...

Biofuels are increasingly being produced and consumed as a partial substitute to fossil-fuel based transport fuels in the fight against climate change. One policy introduced recently by some countries to help ensure biofuels perform better than fossil fuels environmentally is sustainability...

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is one of a new generation of ‘deep’ preferential trade and investment agreements that will extend many of the provisions seen in previous agreements. This paper presents a prospective policy analysis of the likely text of the TPPA, with...