In the course of the second millennium, the Middle East's commerce with Western Europe fell increasingly under European domination. Two factors played critical roles. First, the Islamic inheritance system, by raising the costs of dissolving a partnership following a partner's death, kept Middle...

We review new theories of learning that posit specific, distinct roles for the learner or innovator and their intellectual environment. We consider applications to the dynamics of individual earnings over the life cycle, the diffusion of knowledge within an organization and firm dynamics, and...

In this study, the author describes a classroom experiment on new trade theory appropriate for undergraduate international economics and trade courses. Students portray U.S. and Japanese automobile manufacturers with different average cost schedules. There are five rounds in the experiment,...

There has been little analysis of the effect of inward FDI on international R&D diffusion, especially in LDCs, although FDI has become the core of international production and LDCs have been receiving an increasing share of world FDI over the past few decades. Using data from 57 countries from...

This paper studies the growth and determinants of information technology (IT) trade in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that the rise of IT trade must be understood within the context of increasing vertical fragmentation of production processes that has occurred over the past two decades. To...

Existing studies on the impact of the euro on goods trade report increments between 5% and 40%. These estimates are based on standard panel gravity models for the level of trade. We show that the residuals from these models exhibit upwards trends over time for the euro countries, and that this...

The transition of China towards a market economy was accompanied by a vast fiscal decentralization movement. Econometric analysis of the determinants of public expenditure of the Chinese provinces does not permit rejection of the hypotheses that (i) the behavior of provinces is similar to that...

For many decades, trade policy in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) had involved very high levels of protection and of government intervention. The active pursuit of import substitution policies reduced the openness and efficiency of the regions economies. It also increased their external...

A number of proposals for a tax on the international trade with weapons have been made during the last 25 years, most recently prior to the G-8 summit in Lyon, France, in June 2003. Originally, the major objectives were both to reduce the level of trade in arms and raise money for purposes such...

Does the level of government debt affect living standards and if so, to what extent? We quantify the impact of the U.S. federal debt using an open economy overlapping generations model in which consumers have long but finite lifetimes. A demographic structure allows fiscal policy changes to have...