Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

This study examines the effects of several factors indicating economic opennessimported intermediate goods, total imports, IFDI (inward foreign direct investment), and foreign ownership-on regular, irregular jobs and the ratio of irregular employment to regular employment. Findings revealed that...

This paper reassesses the impact of trade liberalization on productivity. We build a new, unique database of effective tariff rates at the country-industry level for a broad range of countries over the past two decades. We then explore both the direct effect of liberalization in the sector...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms (“stealing”) in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements (“learning”). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

This paper revisits the argument on the contentious causality relationship between net FDI inflows and GDP among the pioneering Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN-5) members using data from 1970 till 2013. Although two-way correlations exist between these two variables in these...

The paper examines the effect of FDI and its interaction with trade openness on income inequality in Nigeria. In doing this, the DOLS estimator is employed to analyse annual time series data covering the period from 1981 to 2015. The study finds that FDI inflows positively affect income...

This paper analyzes the trade-off relationship between exports and horizontal FDI in response to a mutual recognition agreement (MRA) for technical regulations and certification procedures for import goods. As an MRA is concluded to reduce entry costs of exporting, multinationals (MNEs) derive...

There has been a surge in free trade agreements (FTAs), with a total number at the global level touching almost 600 in number. The solid theoretical underpinning is that the FTAs enable faster economic growth and development by creating trade and investment linkages. Compared to the world, the...

China joined the World Trade Organization (‘WTO’) in 2001 after almost 15 years of negotiations, making extensive commitments to open its markets to foreign investment and liberalise trade in goods and services. China represents a huge potential market for foreign telecommunications service...

The disappointing economic performance of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies in the late 1980s prompted reforms in foreign trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the early 1990s. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach and Pedroni panel estimation procedures that allow...