Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

Increasing moves away from multilateralism have created a fragmented trade and investment scenario where economies progressively combine the application of restrictive unilateral actions with bilateral and regional preferences. The application of, and exceptions to, the non-discrimination...

Rules of origin (RoO) are legitimate policy instruments to prevent trade deflection in a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) short of a customs union. Yet, when captured by special interest groups, RoO can restrict trade beyond what is needed to prevent trade deflection. By how much do political...

A collection of the papers and digests on the issues related to regional economic and political integration, primarily in the post-Soviet space. An annual publication of the Eurasian Development Bank edited by Evgeny Vinokurov, director of EDB Centre for Integration Studies.

The book examines the major economic and political transitions currently taking place in the Eurasian continent. Vinokurov and Libman provide a detailed account of various aspects of Eurasian integration, looking at both its bright side (trade, investments and joint infrastructure) and dark side...

Within a single generation, the post-Soviet political, economic, and social landscape has changed immensely. The new structures — ranging from national power structures to a completely new economic reality based on the market instead of centralized planning — have come into existence. As 20...

Every major regional trade agreement now has a services dimension. Is trade in services so different that we need to modify the conclusions on preferential agreements reached so far in the realm of goods? This paper examines, first, the implications of unilateral policy choices in a particular...

Progress and realisation of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) can only be achieved if there is a clear blueprint, which identifies the end goal, the process to reach the end goal and a framework for proper assessment of the costs and benefits of an ASEAN Economic Community. AEC should not be...

The paper aims to add to the understanding of the issues and suggests a framework to move towards the use of best practice in ROOs. Rules of Origin (ROO), originally designed as uncontroversial and neutral devise for authentication and statistical purposes, have evolved over time to accommodate...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...