The larger trading nations have been the main users of the WTO Dispute Settlement system during its first four years of existence (1995-1998). This has prompted a debate about whether the DS system is biased against smaller and poorer countries, for example, because of a lack of legal capacities...

The merger literature almost exclusively considers mergers between exogenously specified firms. This paper proposes an approach to predict the pattern of mergers in situations where different mergers are feasible. It generalizes the traditional industrial organization approach, employing ideas...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the dominant form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but has received only scarce attention in the theory literature on trade and investment. This paper highlights how the international pattern of ownership of productive assets may depend on features of trade...

The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defence in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to internal taxation under the GATT. It is shown...

As international economic integration has progressed, policy makers have started to ponder the possible conflicts arising from nationally pursued competition policies in more unified goods markets. An idea underlying much of this discussion is the notion that international trade liberalisation,...

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...

We examine the setting of national competition policy in a two-country setting,emphasizing the relationship of trade to the goals of competition policy (suchas the degree and nature of competition). The issues we address involve thegeneral equilibrium distributional effects of competition...