The prospects for a successful conclusion to the Doha Development Round (DDR) have become bleak. This paper reviews the main reasons for the difficulties that World Trade Organization (WTO) members face in reaching an agreement and argues that, as the DDR is likely to be the last multilateral...

There is increasing empirical evidence that vertical product differentiation is an important determinant of international trade. However, the economic literature so far has solely focused on the case in which quality trade stems from differences between countries. No studies investigate the role...

The authors show in this paper that increasing the transparency of the trading environment can be an important complement to traditional liberalization of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Our definition of transparency is grounded in a transaction cost analysis. The authors focus on two...

The main objective of this paper is to analyse trade flows and tariff policies of health products. Compared to previous studies, we not only focus on medicines, but on a large set of products that enter the public health space and can be identified in the common trade classification. The first...

Pacific economies are confronted with several structural constraints that limit their economic growth, most importantly their small size and remoteness from major world markets. In this paper we study the importance of transport connectivity for Pacific economies when participating in the world...