In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...

The Asia-Pacific region is not typically seen as one geographic or socio-economic space. Yet, 58 regional economies occupying the space of 28 million square kilometers from Turkey in the West, Russian Federation in the North, French Polynesia in the East and New Zealand in the South belong to...

The proliferation of RTAs is a central feature of the world trade policy environment in the last 20 years. This paper provides an empirical study of the extent to which the formation of RTAs has changed the distribution of world goods trade among trading partners. To do this, it constructs a new...

This chapter highlights the role of the WTO in service trade liberalization

Chapter V specifically emphasizes India’s recent initiatives towards entering into PTAs with East and South-East Asian countries. The chapter critically analyses the depth of PTAs between India and important players in IPNs in order to decide whether they contain the necessary coverage and...

This publication aims to point out how services sector reforms have benefited the poor, and more generally, how regulatory reforms in services have increased the opportunites for more inclusive growth.

This introductory chapter presents the research questions that were explored in the study and describes the structure of the book.