The twelve members of the Commonwealth of Independent States established a Free Trade Area to help maintain trade among each other. More recently, Belarus, Kazakstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Russia agreed, in principle, to establish a Customs Union (CU). The paper concludes that the dynamic...

With the growing importance of services and foreign direct investment in services, it is important to have a framework to analyze the impact of the liberalization of barriers to foreign direct investment in services. This paper summarizes several recent papers and builds policy-based computable...

Export restraints by the Russian Federation on natural gas and timber have been the source of major controversy between the European Union and the Russian Federation. The analysis of this paper suggests that the export restraints in natural gas very substantially benefit Russia. On the other...

This paper discusses the key regulatory, market and political failures that led to the 2008-2009 United States financial crisis. While Congress was fixing the Savings and Loan crisis, it failed to give the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac normal bank supervisory power. This was a...

This chapter examines the arguments for and against a uniform tariff structure. Arguments against uniformity are: terms of trade; 'strategic,' infant or restructuring industry considerations, revenue or balance of payments purposes, and tariffs as a negotiating tool at the WTO. Arguments in favor...

Weaknesses in the institutional capacity of many developing countries provide a rationale for continuing special and differential treatment under the World Trade Organization (WTO), but the benefits should be targeted only to low-income developing countries and those that need help becoming...