This paper examines the effects on national welfare and market access of two public procurement practices, discrimination and nontransparency. Both policies have become prominent in international trade negotiations, including the Doha Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks. We show that fostering either domestic competition or transparency in state contracting tends to improve welfare. In contrast, we find no clear-cut effect on market access of ending discrimination or improving transparency. This mismatch between market access and welfare effects may account for the slower progress in negotiating procurement disciplines in trade agreements than for traditional border measures such as tariffs.
During the current phase of international market integration one important form of corporate restructuring is through cross-border merger or acquisition. Even though such restructuring typically affects the markets of more than one economy, almost all reviews of mergers and acquisitions consider only intra-jurisdictional effects. A prominent international initiative, that has the support of many of the world's competition authorities, seeks to foster both convergence in national merger review regimes and the voluntary adoption of international best practices. Using publicly-available survey data on these regimes, we estimate the relative importance of numerous potential legal, institutional, economic, and political-economy determinants of the degree of national conformity with four merger-related Recommended Practices of the International Competition Network (ICN). We find that the determinants of such conformity differ markedly between the founding members of the ICN and other members. Moreover, certain economic and political-economy factors appear to play a more important role in determining the degree of conformity than legal and institutional factors; a finding that has implications for both the speed and the ultimate extent of convergence in national merger regimes that can be expected from this nonbinding or soft law initiative.
It is often argued that the quid pro quo for accepting WTO commitments on national trade barriers and other policies is improved access to foreign markets. In this study disaggregated information on exports by two developing countries (Bulgaria and Ecuador) and on the trade barriers of the Quad industrialised countries is employed to evaluate two hypotheses concerning the benefits of WTO membership. We cannot reject the hypothesis that post-accession Bulgarian export growth was faster in those product lines that saw larger reductions in MFN tariff rates in the Quad countries. Nor can we reject the hypothesis that Ecuadorian export growth was higher in those product lines where the gap between MFN and GSP rates narrowed faster, suggesting that a reduction in the uncertainty over the terms of their market access to foreign markets has encouraged that country's firms to ship more goods to the leading industrialised economies.
In recent years the benefits of WTO membership has been called into question, notably in the context of discussions on WTO accessions. Previously it was widely thought that better access to the markets of existing WTO members was the quid pro quo for adopting commitments to reform domestic policies, including border measures. Here we revisit this matter and do so by focusing on the accessions to the WTO and its predecessor the GATT of four nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Ecuador, and Jordan. For each country, first, we go to considerable length to establish the factual record concerning the evolution of each nation's trade flows and their recent macroeconomic performance. Then, using two methodologies, we examine whether national exports and imports responded positively after accession.
Access to the fast-growing Chinese economy is prized by policymakers and business people. Concerns that European firms are missing out on the Chinese boom have caused soul-searching in Europe about "competitiveness" and led to accusations of Chinese protectionism. For the first 15 members to join the European Union this paper estimates the determinants of the share of each country's exports going to China from 2000 to 2010. China's growing share of world spending is found to be the most important factor, however labour cost differentials within Europe, two forms of commercial diplomacy, and Chinese export management policies contributed too.
While considerable attention has been directed towards Chinese management of its currency vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar, the frequent alteration during the recent global economic downturn of rebates on value-added taxes paid by exporters on the inputs they have imported has been overlooked. In this paper the relevant Chinese policy changes are documented and evidence to help gauge the relative importance of this form of intervention presented. Given the relatively high share of imported value-added in Chinese exports, even apparently small changes in VAT export rebates are equivalent to non-trivial percentages of domestic value-added. This finding adds further nuance to our understanding of the impact of supply chains on the resort to protectionism during the crisis.
A dataset of state measures implemented between November 2008 and October 2010 that discriminate against foreign commercial interests is used to estimate the determinants of the resort to protectionism by governments during the Great Recession. A well known theory of protectionism is found to be systematically at odds with one important aspect of the data: the more protectionist measures a jurisdiction's government has implemented, the greater the theory under-predicts the amount of discrimination against foreign commercial interests. The extent to which this unexplained variation can be accounted for by other corporate and official factors are then examined
