Does China’s quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity...

Does China's quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity...

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...

Economic sanctions are back and high on the policy agenda. They are used as ‘bloodless’ policy instruments that replace ‘hard’ wars against countries that need to alter their behaviour. Sanctions come in various types and shapes. They can be introduced both by international organisations...

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...

In recent years we have witnessed the crisis in the multilateral trading system, primarily because of the inability of the Doha Development Agenda to produce results after 17 years of negotiations. The reasons are complex large number of participants in these negotiations which complicates...

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...

Policymakers increasingly view China’s rapidly growing wealth as a threat. China currently ranks second, or perhaps even first, in the world in gross domestic product (although 78th in per capita GDP), and the fear is that China will acquire military prowess commensurate with its wealth and...

In its less than 20 years of existence, the WTO has managed to draw public attention. Transparency in the WTO decision-making has been in the agenda of the multilateral trading system for several years. Pressures from developing countries and nongovernmental organizations in particular have led...

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...