The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree of...

The authors analyze the patterns of East Asia's trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) from a global and intraregional perspective, taking into account the importance of trade and FDI interlinkages. They propose two regionally-focused approaches to promoting trade and FDI in East...

Most studies of the opening of the Chinese economy focus at the national level. The few existing disaggregated analyses are limited to analyzing changes in agricultural production. The authors use an innovative village equilibrium model that accounts for nonseparability of household production...

To utilize public resources efficiently, it is required to take full advantage of competition in public procurement auctions. Joint bidding practices are one of the possible ways of facilitating auction competition. In theory, there are pros and cons. It may enable firms to pool their financial...

While there is extensive knowledge about how to design fiscal decentralization policies, considerably less is understood about how a decentralization program should be sequenced and implemented. Countries embarking on decentralization often struggle with decisions about the essential components...

This paper concludes that transparency, openness, and objectivity, are important parts of the American ideal of rule of law. Yet these procedural refinements seem to contribute more to the problem than to a solution. All the emphasis on doing things the right way distracts us from seeing that we...

For most developing countries, the proportion of exports going to other developing countries has steadily increased since the early 1970's. Until that time, most of the developing countries with an outward-looking trade strategy did proportionately less trade with other developing countries,...

The frequent application of antidumping and countervailing measures in the United States in the 1980s has been described as a new form of protection. The author measures the effect not only of investigations (to evaluation claims of dumping or subsidies) but of the resulting duties, by measuring...

As each new round of multilateral trade negotiations approaches, there is a demand for a negotiating rule that would give credit for autonomous (unilateral) liberalization. The authors show that the feasibility, and desirability of such a rule depend on when it is instituted. A credit rule...

International commodity agreements (ICAs) fit uneasily in a world in which markets are becoming globalized and increasingly competitive. Development policy - both as preached by international agencies and as practiced by typically democratically elected and nonsocialist governments in the major...