Trade costs such as applied tariffs, transportation and insurance costs are amplified as they pass through the multiple production steps associated with modern supply chains. This so-called "cascade effect" arises since trade costs accumulate as intermediate goods are imported and then...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

With a growing integration via trade and investment, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that have traditionally been oriented towards domestic markets increasingly compete with private firms in the global market place. Three principal questions emerge from the international trade perspective: (1)...

Lex mercatoria or Law Merchant (‘LM’) is said to be the self-made law of international commerce. According to its proponents, LM is an autonomous legal order that not only supplements state commercial law, but works as a substitute for it. The ‘ancient’ LM, which accompanied the...

The article summarises the main lessons of the Bank’s 2010 conference which focused on international trade and foreign direct investment. The research is based on a microeconomic approach to the behaviour of Belgian firms, with reference to developments in the scientific literature on the...

Although many firms operate on global digital platforms, small countries and firms also play an essential role at the national level, especially during crises and the slowdown in globalization. This research investigates trade patterns in digital services at the country and firm level and...

Using a conventional multi-region, multi-sectoral global trade analysis project (GTAP) model, we analyze the effects of India’s trade liberalization policies on its output, trade, and welfare. We also analyze three trade policy scenarios: full trade liberalization, joint cooperative trade...

Trade and investment in services are difficult to measure, and the regulatory barriers that inhibit the free flow of services are hard to quantify. As a result, very little attention has been paid to dismantling barriers to services trade and investment in free trade negotiations. This paper...

Korean defense exports have grown at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world in the five year period from 2017 to 2021, exploding by 177 percent and positioning Korea as the world’s eighth-largest defense exporter. Moreover, if after final accounting Korean defense exports came to more...