There is a widespread consensus that China’s growth paradigm needs a rebalancing away from investment and external demand and towards consumption and domestic demand. This rebalancing process is supposed to be accompanied by the transition towards Renminbi’s full convertibility. In contrast,...

The Dispute Settlement System (DSS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is a mechanism to settle international trade controversies by means of adversarial procedures. In this paper we aim to address the following question: why is the DSS adversarial in kind and articulated through such...

This work investigates the determinants of virtual water trade (VWT) flows by means of an estimated gravity model of trade applied to the virtual water embodied in the agricultural goods exchanged across countries. In line with the recent literature on the gravity model, the paper presents a...

This work investigates the systemic factors behind cross-country variability in the transnational media coverage of foreign news in the EU in 2010. Using a large dataset on the transnational coverage of news by 148 EU national media, the paper maps the network of EU transnational citations and...

The aim of the paper is to investigate the main determinants of the bilateral virtual water ‘flows’ associated with international trade in agricultural goods across the Mediterranean basin. Virtual water refers to the volume of water used in the production of a commodity or a service. The...

We model in an endogenous growth set-up the hypotheses that the expansion of market activities weakens social capital formation, and that firms can invest in formal mechanisms of control and enforcement to substitute for social capital (trust, work ethics, honesty). The model shows that the...