We provide evidence that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns, reduces US imports from that country during the second wave of globalization. Though statistically, significant, such an effect...

Is political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with China? The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with China. We run a gravity model of...

The purpose of this article is to capture as much as possible, the defining of past and present Doha Round, seen as a unique opportunity to strengthen the multilateral trading system based on non-discriminatory rules and its preparation for the challenges of XXI century. Basing on an inductive...

Die globale Wirtschaftskrise führt zu einem massiven Anstieg der Arbeitslosigkeit, und fast alle Regierungen haben die Sicherung der heimischen Beschäftigung zu einem zentralen Ziel ihrer Wirtschaftspolitik erklärt. In den USA wurde sofort nach dem Amtsantritt von Präsident Obama ein...

The global economic crisis has led to a massive increase in unemployment, and nearly all governments have declared the protection of domestic jobs to be a central economic policy aim. In the US, an additional $790-billion economic stimulus package was adopted immediately after President Obama...

How do foreign interests influence the policy determination process? What are the welfare implications of such foreign influence? In this paper we develop a model of foreign influence and apply it to the study of optimal tariffs. We develop a two-country voting model of electoral competition,...

What do trade negotiators negotiate about? There are two distinct theoretical approaches in the economics literature that offer an answer to this question: the terms-of-trade theory and the commitment theory. The terms-of-trade theory holds that trade agreements are useful to governments as a...

On 1 May 2004, the world witnessed the largest expansion in the history of the European Union (EU). This process has lent new weight to the idea of an expanded EU involvement in East Asia. This paper will examine the question of whether there has been a change in the EU’s foreign policy with...

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the...

How do foreign interests influence the policy determination process? What are the welfare implications of such foreign influence? In this paper we develop a model of foreign influence and apply it to the study of optimal tariffs. We develop a two-country voting model of electoral competition,...