In their current haste to deliver, the Doha negotiators seem to head for a package combining increased market access for “easy” products (mostly those with low or moderate tariffs) with broad exceptions in “difficult” sectors (mostly those with high tariffs). Such a mix may increase the...

Over the past two decades, nearly all developing countries and transition economies have undertaken important changes in their trade regimes, often as part of World Bank-International Monetary Fund programs. Recently, further changes in trade regimes have been driven by participation in regional...

Contrary to what is still often believed, the climate and trade communities have a lot in common: a common problem (a global “public good”) common foes (vested interests using protection for slowing down climate change policies) and common friends (firms delivering goods, services and...

La loi sur la modernisation de l’économie (LME) a « pour ambition de relancer la concurrence ». Mais le projet de loi déposé se réduit, en fait, à une politique de l’indice des prix. En remontant de 300 à 1000 mètres carrés le seuil de déclenchement de la procédure...

MANY governments think they could not secure the support of domestic producer interests for the trade-liberalizing agreements they negotiate with other countries without provisions in them that permit a degree of flexibility in implementing the core obligations they undertake in the event of...

The internal market for services, which are estimated to account for 60 to 70 per cent of economic activity in the European Union, is still rife with legal and administrative barriers to cross-border trade. The problems involved in integrating national services markets into one large internal...

The authors compare the European Community's "trade fundamentals" prevailing in the 1960s with those applying in Arab countries today. The fundamentals differ significantly-Arab countries trade much less with each other than EC members did, and the importance of such trade in GDP varies greatly....

Designing its trade policy towards China, Europe should exert extreme foresightedness. Rather than to be trapped in bilateral trade balance conflicts (economically meaningless and politically hopeless), the EU should push for objectives that are attractive to its own interests, and to Chinese...

This paper examines the impact of trade and capital movements on French employment and relative wages. It provides three results. First, trade has a modest impact on total employment. Second, trade has a strong impact on relative wages; the paper provides evidence supporting the saying that...

In its latest Report on the “financial and economic crisis and trade-related developments” (26 March 2009), the WTO used the term “significant slippage” to qualify changes in protection observed from late 2008 to March 2009. Most of the newspapers in the world translated these terms into...