As part of the Kyoto agreement on limiting carbon emissions, from 2008 onwards an international market in auction able carbon permits will be established. This raises the issue of whether trading should be simply between governments or between companies, or in the latter case how such permits...

I investigate the imposition of a horizontal technical barrier to trade (HTBT) in a symmetric, cross-hauling duopoly. Tariffs and subsidies are ruled out, but, in the absence of a mutual recognition agreement, it is possible for governments to impose HTBTs, so long as firms apply different...

We investigate the merger decision between two firms in an outsourcing relationship, one upstream and the other downstream. The inter-firm relationship is subject both to ex ante matching uncertainty and to contractual efficiency issues. Cross-border merger is assumed to solve the latter...

Globalisation is associated with long periods of sustained economic growth and credit expansion, whereas major recessions tend to lead to falling trade and protectionism. The sensitivity of trade to global economic conditions is not simply driven by policy: rather, in a model of costly search,...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

We examine strategic biases in the international regulation of monopolistic or oligopolistic industries, where a minimum vertical quality standard is imposed on a classical monopoly or duopoly, to correct an undersupply of quality. This differs from Hotelling-based studies, where the aim of...

We examine the geo-political and international spatial aspects of human rights (HR), using a purpose designed data-set. Applying tools from the spatial economics literature, we analyse the impact on a country’s HR performance of geographical proximity to its neighbours. Unlike previous...

We explore the uses of double-calibrated general equilibrium models as a decomposition tool for analysing contributory factors in the growth and increasing wage inequality in an advanced economy (the UK) since 1979. Calibration of a model to start and end years, based upon an assumed functional...

Globalisation is associated with long periods of sustained economic growth and credit expansion, whereas major recessions tend to lead to falling trade and protectionism. The sensitivity of trade to global economic conditions is not simply driven by policy: rather, in a model of costly search,...

By looking at post colonial trade relationships of the world countries for period of 1948-2006, Head and Mayer (HM [Head et al. (2010)]) conclude that a country's trade with the colonizer, typically, erodes by 60% after 30 years of independence. However, the CAR (Central Asian Republics(CAR)...