Using a new set of measures of concentration of trade, I suggest that the opening up of trade to date has been greatly exaggerated. At least judging on the basis of trade concentration, agriculture and service sectors should barely be seen as globalised at all. Contrary to other recent studies,...

Regulatory standards, such as on health and safety, may be subject to strategic bias when a country engages in trade. Where regulation is to correct an undersupply of quality by a monopolistic industry, if regulators do not cooperate and …rms can vary standards, there will be a tendency to...

This paper examines the implications of increasing globalisation of stock market ownership on the economics of protection. Current data on European stock exchanges indicate that over 30 per cent of the stock market is foreign-owned in most cases, a large increase on a couple of decades ago.This...

I explore the interpretation of global and regional economic integration as issues of equality of access for producers in di¤erent locations to any particular market. An industry in an individual country can be seen as becoming more globalised as producers worldwide gain more equal access to...

I outline the potential implications of sectoral factor immobility for the debate on the effects of low-wage competition on wage inequality in advanced countries. In theory, the presence of sector-specific factors serves to damp the magnification effect of World traded prices upon relative...

A major current issue in the economics of trade blocs is where the bloc is not just a customs union, but also incorporates substantial regulatory harmonisation or mutual recognition elements. The derivation of the costs of non-membership of such a bloc is not straightforward. In this paper I...

Post-Soviet restructuring has produced mixed economic results. In general, the more advanced countries, which have now joined the European Union, have fared better, while those further East in the CIS have seen a combination of rapid falls in measured gross domestic product and wages, followed...

Mankiw, Romer and Weil's (1992) finding of a cross-country relationship between savings rates, school enrolment and income levels is highly ambiguous. Their in- terpretation that it is consistent with an augmented Solow model depends on the implausible assumption that educational productivity is...

Previous studies characterize some of the Former Soviet Central Asian countries (CACs) as “more open” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) and others as “more isolated” (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) depending on their trade-over-GDP level. Being an open or isolationist economy has...

We examine the R&D and export decisions of two ex ante symmetric firms in symmetric countries, with both unit trade costs and fixed entry costs to the export market. When both trade costs are low, there will be a symmetric, cross-hauling duopoly, but if fixed costs are fairly high, unit trade...