Italian Abstract: Dal punto di vista storico, le sovvenzioni statali vennero introdotte e diventarono prassi comune durante i Secoli XVI e XVII, in concomitanza con l'affermarsi delle teorie mercantiliste, anche se tendenze analoghe si erano già presentate in epoche precedenti. Nel corso di...

This contribution illustrates some unresolved issues and tensions that characterize the way the WTO deals with renewable energy subsidies. Indeed, the indisputable urgency to address the negative impacts of climate change on the one hand, and the use of subsidies to boost and support a...

Renewable energy subsidies are crucial for combatting climate change, and yet the world’s international legal infrastructure is not designed to accommodate such subsidies. The world needs a renewable energy sector to develop and implement the technologies necessary to reduce carbon and...

Do conflicts among naval powers hurt international trade? In theory the commercially relevant aspects of aggressive naval power can either thwart trade (through blockades, embargoes, commerce raiding, and guerre de course strategies) or facilitate trade (through control of trade routes and...

While protesters took to the streets in the Battle in Seattle demanding greater accountability from international institutions, such as the WTO and the IMF, and the end of an "era of trade negotiations conducted by sheltered elites balancing competing commercial interests behind closed doors,"...

This chapter surveys empirically the broad features of trade policy in goods for 31 major economies that collectively represented 83% of the world's population and 91% of the world's GDP in 2013. We address five questions: Do some countries have more liberal trading regimes than others? Within...

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that...

With greater importance given to the climate change debate, energy has slowly attracted the complete attention of the whole world. The energy sector can be roughly divided into renewable energy, on the one hand, and fossil fuels, on the other. The former category is at the core of all the main...

We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe on these flows. Using novel data on 800,000 translations and difference-in-differences approaches, we show that while translations between Communist languages...

This is an assessment of China and U.S. litigation against each other in the WTO from 2001 through 2010. It discloses the active and aggressive nature of litigation between these two countries. It indicates an almost flawless continuation of Bush era policies by the Obama administration. If...