The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution of the past 3 decades has transformed the world into an integrated marketplace. Today, producers and consumers alike are able to compare the prices of local businesses and worldwide sellers. For an increasing number of tradable goods,...

The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution of the past 3 decades has transformed the world into an integrated marketplace. Today, producers and consumers alike are able to compare the prices of local businesses and worldwide sellers. For an increasing number of tradable goods,...

This paper studies how East Asia’s trade composition and orientation have changed over the past decade and analyzes the implications for the region and beyond. Over the last 2 decades we have witnessed the emergence of regional and global supply chains, in which production is divided into...

This paper analyses the EEA and bilateral agreements vote results at the 3025 community level of the Swiss Confederation by simultaneously modelling the vote and the participation decisions. Regressions include economic and political factors. The economic variables are the aggregated shares of...

Les accords commerciaux préférentiels, à la différence des unions douanières, utilisent les règles d'origine (RO) afin de prévenir l'entrée de biens par le pays de la zone dont le droit de douane est le plus faible. Les règles d'origine augmentent les coûts de production et créent des...

This Paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of surveillance firms to the generation of...

All preferential trading agreements (PTAs) short of a customs union use rules of origin (ROO) to prevent trade deflection. ROO raise production costs and create administrative costs. This paper argues that in the case of the recent wave of North-South PTAs, the presence of ROO virtually limits...

All preferential trading agreements (PTAs) short of a customs union use Rules of Origin (RoO) to prevent trade deflection. RoO raise production costs and create administrative costs. This Paper argues that in the case of the recent wave of North-South PTAs, the presence of RoO virtually limits...

The re-elections to the Swiss Federal Government ('Federal Council') have not been much studied so far. On the basis of the 1947-1999 record, we propose an econometric model of these re-elections, consisting of four identities and two equations, the first of the latter explaining the score of...

During the recent financial crisis many countries resorted to protectionist measures to try to boost demand for domestically-produced goods. In this paper we explore the extent to which the adoption of protectionist measures led to retaliation by other countries undermining the increase in...