It is widely recognized that forecasting future climate shocks at a regional level̶which regions will be flooded, which ones will be under water stress on a year by year basis̶is largely out of reach. In such circumstances, trade gets back a role that has faded away during the last sixty years...

Après avoir longtemps ignoré l'Etat et son rôle dans la vie économique, les économistes, notamment sous l'influence de Pigou et plus encore de Keynes, ont révéré cette institution, lui accordant une connaissance approfondie des événements passés, présents et futurs, ainsi que le...

As requested by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, this note focuses on Articles 14 and 15 of the proposed Directive on services. These two provisions are crucial: they define the “screening” process and the timetable which will make operational the “country of...

L’article commence par estimer le niveau et les coûts de la protection en Europe. Le niveau moyen de protection (droits de douane et principales barrières non-tarifaires) est de 12 % environ (contre 14 % jusqu’en 1997) avec des pics élevés pour les produits agricoles et certains biens...

As most of the high tariffs protect agricultural products, consumers tend to back off because they often support small farmers. But the term “agriculture” is a misnomer. The Doha negotiators deal with processed food roughly three times more often than with farm products per se. Moreover, the...

One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and three years after the start of the food and commodities crisis, time seems ripe to make a provisional assessment of the resilience of the open trade policies to this severe downturn, and to draw the main lessons. In attempting to answer this...

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...

Cet article examine les problèmes posés par la coexistence, difficile, entre les politiques du commerce extérieur et de la concurrence, dans le contexte du GATT et de son héritière, l'Organisation mondiale du commerce (OMC). Elle montre que ces problèmes, s'ils sont traditionnels, se...

A lack of political leadership is often perceived as the main source of the repeated difficulties of the WTO. The paper argues that such a lack of leadership is a systemic problem for many years to come. The large industrial democracies have constitutional rules making particularly difficult...

The issue of State aids (or subsidies) in an international perspective is a permanent source of conflicts because it is at the junction of three opposite views — the mercantilist attitude, the pure trade theory and the political economy approach. First, in a mercantilist perspective focusing...