infonet-economy

How can small and young agencies cope and target cross border cartels? This paper explores the related challenges and puts forward a pragmatic tool to break down international cooperation barriers. Given the efforts of the ICN in seeking ways and means to operationalise cross-border cooperation in investigation of cases as well as those of selected UNCTAD member States in trying to…

The summer 2016 saw some of the key emerging economies change their position on services negotiations at the WTO, which may prove instrumental in bringing services back to the WTO, via The Trade in services Agreement (TiSA). While TiSA parties have discussed critical mass based multilateralization for a while, another approach may prove to be more viable - "incrementalism" and "quasi…

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 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…

This paper synthesizes previous studies analyzing the effects of capital account liberalization on industry growth while controlling for financial crises, domestic financial development and the strength of institutions. We find reasonably strong evidence that financial openness has positive effects on the growth of financially-dependent industries, although these growth-enhancing…

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…

What were the economic benefits and costs of preventing a stock market meltdown during the summer of 2015 by the Chinese government intervention? We answer this question by estimating the value creation for the stocks purchased by the government between the period starting with the market crash in mid-June and the market recovery in September. We find that the government intervention…