Singapore in the History of British North Borneo : an Examination of Singapore as Centre to the Region / Danny Tze Ken Wong -- China, Entrepo??t Trade, and Singapore Chinese Merchants, 1945-65 / Jason Lim -- Trading Hub Beyond Ideologies : Singapore-North Korean Economic Connection and Mission...

We use global tariffs to reveal the weights that nations implicitly place on the welfare of their trading partners relative to their own. Our estimated welfare weights suggest that formal and informal rules of the world trading system make countries internalize the impact of their policies onto...

This paper, based on the Mattei Lecture that the author delivered at the 2025 Africa Growth and Opportunity–Research in Action Conference, argues that Africa can anchor a new model of growth—and bolster global resilience—by shifting from commodity dependence to value-added production and...

Energy-sector challenges have shaped international relations since early history, making energy a key component of geopolitics. Understanding current global and regional energy and economic trends is therefore essential. Armenia, like many European Union countries, faces significant challenges...

How would fundamental political change in Iran, leading to a democratic system with a free and rulesbased economic order, affect Germany and the EU economically? In the event of change, sanctions could be scaled back, allowing Iran to rejoin the global economy. This study quantifies the economic...

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has triggered profound structural changes in the country's economy, reshaping patterns of foreign trade, foreign direct investment and sectoral specialisation. This paper analyses the shifts in Ukraine's trade and investment structures...

African governments are entering the geopolitical competition over critical raw materials with a growing sense of strategic confidence. While the AU-EU Summit in Luanda in November 2025 reaffirmed political commitments on both sides, European initiatives continue to lose ground. It is true that...

Five years after the bloody military coup and amid a civil war, elections have taken place in Myanmar. They were neither free nor fair, nor was any attempt made to keep up an appearance of even minimum democratic standards. From the outset, the main purpose of the elections was not political...

Central Asia has emerged as a key region where the convergence of geopolitics and development cooperation is most visible. Major powers are redefining their approaches: Japan combines official development assistance (ODA) with commercial partnerships to advance connectivity and reform; the EU is...

This study, set against the backdrop of escalating trade tensions between China and the United States, examines the impact of soybean tariff adjustments on the abnormal asymmetric behavior in the futures market. By employing specialized analytical methods that capture market volatility asymmetry...

We study the sustainability of international trading rules in a multipolar world. A rules-based equilibrium is shaped by three forces. A static temptation to exploit market power undermines cooperation, while two dynamic forces support it: the efficiency gains from rules and the cost of...

Die Bedeutung des globalen Dienstleistungshandels hat in den letzten Jahren stark zugenommen. So erreichte der Dienstleistungsexport gemessen an den weltweiten Gesamtexporten im Jahr 2023 einen Anteil von über 27 Prozent, in der EU gar von rund 33 Prozent. Gegenüber 2010 ist das global gesehen...

In Latin America, Mexico (2020), Chile (2022) and Colombia (2022) have all officially committed to a feminist foreign policy (FFP). The introduction of a feminist approach to foreign policy should be seen in the context of a growing awareness of gender issues in international, regional and...

Debates on the EU's economy focus on the competitiveness gap, a narrative that encourages export-first policies. This is the wrong focus, as prosperity depends mainly on domestic productivity. Therefore, the EU's key challenges are weak productivity and, more recently, economic security. Trade...

This study investigates the agri-food sector, food trade, and food availability (as a component of food security) within the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), emphasizing the critical importance of agriculture across its member states. This significance is particularly pronounced in less...

There is a prevailing belief that international law can be harnessed to prevent international problems. However, international law is an intrinsic part of the current state of the capitalist world system. This issue is often overlooked in the dominant discourse. Yet, the international law,...

This year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin marked the largest gathering in the organisation’s history, drawing more than 20 heads of state and 10 representatives of international organisations. At the SCO+ session, China’s Head of State and Party Leader Xi...

The world is falling behind on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a situation exacerbated by recent geopolitical disruptions and challenges to international cooperation. This policy brief, based on a virtual roundtable in the context of the Hamburg Sustainability Conference (HSC) with...

Industrial policy has returned to the centre of global economic debate. Once dismissed as inefficient, government intervention is now seen as vital for addressing climate change, technological competition and supply chain vulnerabilities. Yet the rise in uncoordinated national strategies risks...

Launched in 2013, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through a network of physical and digital infrastructure. This article analyses the BRI's development in the European context by offering a comparative analysis of 727 BRI and BRI-like...

This empirical qualitative research explores the texts of 14 free trade agreements (FTAs) concluded by Arab Gulf countries individually or as block. The objective is to evaluate if these documents are gender-responsive using an internationally recognised framework that qualitatively measures if...

This study examines the impact of the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) on participation in global value chains (GVCs) among South Asian economies, specifically Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. This research offers new empirical insights into the relatively underexplored relationship...

This policy brief considers the economic dependencies of Finland and the European Union on the United States. We seek to provide an overview of dependencies related to foreign trade, direct investment and finance, excluding closely related topics such as technological dependencies. The US is a...

Campos et al. (2021) (Economics Letters) show that including domestic trade flows in the gravity model is important for estimating the effect of trade agreements (TAs), regardless of how these flows are measured. Without domestic trade flows, TA effects are small, negative, and statistically...

Using a state of the art structural gravity model, we investigate the impact of various (post-)colonial cocoa trading arrangements on the cocoa trade between developing cocoa producer countries and rich industrial cocoa consumer nations in the time period 1951 to 1999. We find that in particular...