The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, 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 programmable web in a format that can directly be used for statistical analysis in R without bothering about the data's initial format and nesting structure. It was developed specially for users who have no experience with web technologies and merely use R as a statistical software. The core idea and methodological contribution of the package are the disentangling of parsing web data and mapping them with a generic algorithm (independent of the initial data structure) to a at table-like representation. This paper provides an overview of the high-level functions for R-users, explains the basic architecture of the package, and illustrates the implemented data mapping algorithm.
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 efforts, public policy deliberations on crisis-era policy response in particular as they relate to state purchasing policy, and discussions on the relative merits of strengthening disciplines on public procurement matters in trade agreements.
From an economic perspective this paper critically assesses whether the negotiation of mega-regional RTAs calls for a reassessment of our understanding of the tensions and complementarities between RTAs and the multilateral trading system. The assessment confronts idealized conceptions of the latter with the reality of multilateral rulemaking in the postwar era.
The trade distortions implemented during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the global slump of the early 1980s influenced the subsequent evolution of the world trading system, not least because policymakers recognised the deficiencies in existing trade rules. Evidence is presented here on the incidence and trade coverage of the principal means by which governments have discriminated against foreign commercial interests since the onset of the global economic crisis. This evidence is hard to square with claims that multilateral trade rules held back protectionism. Preparing the ground to fix the flaws in current rules and in dispute settlement should be part of the WTO's future work programme.
