infonet-economy

On May 26, 2017, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann published an Op Ed titled "Hunger Bonds", urging investors to avoid Venezuelan sovereign bonds on the grounds that the country was prioritizing payments on the bonds over remedying a humanitarian crisis. Contemporaneously, news emerged regarding a suspicious looking bond issue by Venezuela's oil company that was purchased largely by…

This study analyzes how and to what extent South Korea has embedded developmental liberalism into its FTA initiative, departing from its traditional focus on developmental mercantilism. In the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008-10 and the subsequent expansion of government interventionism across the world, the developmental state model has attracted renewed scholarly…

How do states design dispute settlement mechanisms in preferential trade agreements? And why do they choose the design features they eventually decide upon? This study proposes to test established theories of institutional design with a new dataset, and explores the possibility of an alternative explanation: institutionalist theory considers acts of design to be unique and…

United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals' SDG 5 places gender equality front and centre for sustainable development. The Joint Declaration on Trade and Women's Economic Empowerment on the Occasion of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires in December 2017 brings gender equality to the forefront of trade policy. In the intersection of trade policy and digital…

Relative to the study of free trade agreements, customs unions (CUs) have been neglected in international law scholarship, despite the fact that by no means do they constitute a recent phenomenon. The present article aims to fill this gap by conducting a scoping analysis of the concept of customs union and identifying key issues in CU designs. The article problematizes what is…

This paper reviews the economic and historical literature on debt mutualization in Europe with reference to pre-1914 guaranteed bonds and current Eurobonds debate. We emphasize that, notwithstanding the differences in scale and nature, debt mutualization solutions similar to Eurobonds were tried before, and the closest historical examples to the present debate are the pre-1914…

We show that an increase in aggregate uncertainty -measured by stock market volatility- reduces productivity growth more in industries that depend heavily on external finance. The mechanism at play is that during periods of high uncertainty, firms that are credit constrained switch the composition of investment by reducing productivity-enhancing investment- such as on ICT capital-…