U.S. trade policy since the 1980s has been quite different from trade policy in the first two or three decades after World War II. Until the 1970s, U.S.trade policy was dominated by systematic concerns. Trade policy actions were subject to the disciplines of constructing an open, stable, and...

Should fair trade rules be replaced by national or international competition rules? A familiar argument for doing so is that more rigorously enforced competition standards might eliminate the basis for the burgeoning number of antidumping cases of recent years. A less familiar argument is that...

The authors try to gauge why the GATT dispute settlement process has, to date, been so ineffective in disciplining the use of antidumping measures. Focusing on the five cases in which panels have completed their findings and recommendations, the authors identify the sources of this...

The literature on the theory of the firm is rich in theoretical and practical insights. The key messages in this overview are the following: (a) the modern theory of the firm provides many insights into political organization, for political jurisdictions can be viewed as pseudo-firms that...

The authors argue that further moves to liberalize trade and to implement existing GATT rules and principles may have a greater impact on global competition than would the pursuit of harmonization of competition policy. They also suggest that current GATT rules and case law provide scope for...

Why does income inequality differ among countries? Using a sample of 80 countries from the 1980s, the author shows that two types of factors explain variations in income inequality. The first are factors that are, in the short term, independent of economic policies and are included in the...

Certain themes and findings emerge from the authors analysis of key relationships between research and development (R&D) and other factors. Among them: (1) R&D capital and the structure of production: (a) R&D capital facilitates the mapping of technological possibilities into economic...

Price and income elasticities estimated from a country's export demand function are used both to predict and to prescribe effective export strategies. But the focus on elasticities has led to the neglect of an important empirical regularity: a strong persistencein the growth rate of a country's...

Cotton exports account for a significant share of total commodity exports in francophone African countries, suggesting that these countries have a large exposure to volatility in cotton prices. An analysis of the cotton marketing systems in these countries revealed that most of the price risk is...

The authorexamines a range of cross-sectional variation in performance and policies for evidence on what distinguishes successes from failures. At about 6 percent, the growth rate of the Four Tigers - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) - are among the largest...