infonet-economy

The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven sciences. The access to, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the…

Having grown in real terms by 60% between 2000 to 2008, extra-EU exports have since stagnated. Stripping out other determinants of EU export growth, the focus here is on the impact of trade distortions imposed by foreign governments since the global economic crisis began. Our econometric analysis implies that crisis-era trade distortions held back EU Member State export growth to…

This paper establishes a measure of bilateral differences in values using 857 questions from the World Values Survey. We explore the determinants of value distance, linking it to geography as well as the historical relatedness of populations across 90 countries. Furthermore, we explore the explanatory power of value distance for the diffusion of technological development.

Not since the London Summit of in April 2009 has protectionism had such a high profile in the run-up to a G20 Leader’s Summit. President Trump’s America First policies have drawn sharp criticism from leaders of other G20 governments. Accusations and counter-accusations of unfair trading practices have become a regular occurrence. So as to shed light on competing claims, this Global…

This paper investigates the impact of human barriers to international trade using ancestral distance as a measure of the relatedness between populations. In a new data set covering the universe of global trade, our findings document that country pairs with a high ancestral distance are less likely to trade with each other (extensive margin) and if they do trade, ancestral distance…

We develop a new methodological framework for the empirical study of legislative vote trading. Building on the concept of reciprocity in directed weighted networks, our method facilitates the measurement of vote trading on a large scale, while estimating the micro-structure of trades between individual legislators. In principle, it can be applied to a broad variety of voting data and…

This paper summarises the principal findings of the data collection efforts by the independent Global Trade Alert team on public procurement policy changes undertaken since November 2008. A particular focus is on policy changes that alter the relative treatment of domestic firms vis-à-vis foreign rivals. The ultimate goal of this paper is to inform other, ongoing data collection…

This report demonstrates that talk of a global trade slowdown is misplaced. Since January 2015 world trade volumes have plateaued, which is unusual as pauses in trade growth are typically associated with global recessions. A global trade plateau is a major source of concern as it is likely to add to the temptation of governments to engage in zero-sum commercial policies that seek to…

This paper discusses several problems of direct popular decisions. In the first part, we consider problems related to the functioning of direct democracy. As a political system it only makes sense if there exists a continuous process and not if only occasional single questions are brought to a referendum. Then, the relation between direct democracy and the rule of unanimity is…