infonet-economy

This paper critically evaluates the contention that the implementation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would adversely affect the centrality of the World Trade Organization. Not only are many Asian nations members of the WTO, but some undertook major reforms to join. Contrary to much existing literature, it is argued here that governments in the Asia-Pacific region should not be…

Existing work on the effects of electoral reforms suggests that decreasing the costs of voting may exacerbate rather than reduce representational biases in turnout. We argue that some electoral institutions may have more uniform mobilization effects than previously thought and exploit the sequential introduction of postal voting in Switzerland to analyze how an exogenous decrease in…

As global trade continues to stagnate, the spotlight has shifted during China’s G20 Presidency to foreign direct investment (FDI).Two recent developments have brought FDI to the forefront of international policy deliberations. First, at their annual meeting in July 2016, G20 trade ministers endorsed nine G20 Guiding Principles for Global Investment Policymaking. Second, in June 2016…

In this paper we assess the quality and coherence of the use of economics in dispute settlement in two fields of international economic law: international trade and international investment law. We argue that four economic concepts are frequently used and/or of critical importance for both international trade and investment law. Those concepts are the concepts of “likeness”/”like…

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…

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an R&D based growth model to study how demand forces shape the impact of inequality on innovation and growth. Inequality affects the incentive to innovate via a price effect and a market size effect. When innovators have a large productivity advantage over traditional producers a higher extent of inequality tends to increase innovators…

This article attempts to show that from 12 December 2016, WTO Members can no longer use the analogue country or similar methodologies as the basis for normal value calculations in anti-dumping proceedings targeting China and should rather use Chinese domestic prices or costs. However, contrary to what some would like decision-makers to believe, this does not mean that the EU or other…

We propose a forensic approach to investigate the politico-economic forces that influence narrow vote outcomes in legislative assemblies. Applying nonparametric estimation techniques to a data set covering all roll call votes between 1990 and 2014, we can identify the existence of precise control over legislative vote outcomes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Several pieces of…