The International Monetary Fund was designed during World War II by men whose worldview had been shaped by the Great War and the Great Depression. Their views on how the postwar international monetary system should function were also shaped by their economics training and their nationalities....

Incorporating intermediate inputs into a small-union general-equilibrium model, this paper first develops the welfare economics of preferential trading under the rules of origin (ROO) and then demonstrates that the ROO could improve the political viability of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Two...

The dominant academic literature about trade agreements maintains that they are only about national terms-of-trade manipulation and not at all about purely political concerns. Non-academic economists, commentators, and diplomats by contrast think that trade agreements are all about political...

In this paper we analyze the effect of the freedom to pursue preferential trade liberalization, permitted by Article XXIV of the GATT, on country's incentives to participate in multilateral negotiations and on the feasibility of the global free trade. We present a model in which countries choose...

Neo-liberal globalisation has primarily entailed the liberalisation of trade and capital flows, but largely ignored the issue of labour mobility. Most literature on the political economy of globalisation likewise ignores global labour mobility. This paper first asks how globalisation affects...

There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized by very large economic disparities across subnational regions. Yet the lack of systematic and reliable empirical data at subnational levels of aggregation has made it difficult to explore possible...

There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized by very large economic disparities across subnational regions. Yet the lack of systematic and reliable empirical data at subnational levels of aggregation has made it difficult to explore possible...

This unique volume highlights Taiwan's ongoing efforts to mediate between competing political actors, a means to ensure domestic stability and national security without severely affecting its continuous economic growth and sovereign status in international society. Taiwan's Politics in the 21st...