The world trading system is reeling from the trade war between China and the United States, the disabling of the World Trade Organisation Dispute Settlement Understanding and repeated rule-breaking by WTO members. This does not mean the end of the post-war system, but it is being transformed...

Since 1947 when the general agreement on tariff and Trade (GATT), a process initiated simple rules to govern the liberalisation of trade. The GATT from 1947 to 1994 has had eight rounds of negotiation, bringing mainly the commercial trade among the developed countries. More the five decades of...

This analysis attempts to offer a counter strategy to the idea of anti-globalization and de-growth that had flared up again since the COVID-19 crisis. All international forecasts expect for the year 2020 the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Countries which can afford it, run a...

The effects of international trade on the planet's climate and environment are manifold and complex. This makes assessment of the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) a delicate matter. This study provides an overview of the development of sustainability chapters in FTAs and discusses their...

This paper reviews the history of bilateral trade negotiations between Taiwan and the U.S. The question posed at the outset is: does bilateralism enhance or jeopardize multilateralism? The U.S.-Taiwan experience seems to suggest a grossly negative answer. Bilateral negotiations for market...

This paper discusses both the potential contribution that trade policy initiatives can make towards the achievement of significant global carbon emissions reduction and the potential impacts of proposals now circulating for carbon reduction motivated geographical trade arrangements, including...

This article shows how China’s rise has radically altered the politics of one of the most prominent and controversial issues in the global trading system: agriculture subsidies. Agriculture subsidies depress global prices and undermine the competitiveness and livelihoods of poor farmers, and...

Global Britain has not delivered according to the hopes expressed by supporters of leaving the EU. Trade with the rest of the world has not grown to make up for leaving a bloc with seamless trade, early Free Trade Agreements with Australia and New Zealand are of minor economic significance, and...

We study long-run environmental impacts of trade liberalization on US manufacturing by exploiting a plausibly exogenous reduction in US trade policy uncertainty: the conferral of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China. Using detailed data on establishment-level pollution emissions and...

In this study, we investigate three trade policy scenarios: i) the revival of multilateralism, ii) plurilateral cooperation, and iii) geopolitical rivalry. In the first scenario, both tariffs and NTMs are reduced on a multilateral basis. In the second scenario, varying groups of countries...

For many years now, lack of progress in multilateral trade negotiations has been a major cause of concern among WTO members. With diversity in the economic situation of members and differences in their stages of development, delay in concluding trade agreements is inevitable. However, the...

The WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) has been predicted to bring about an expansion in trade flows and real income gains. To date, there is still very limited empirical evidence on the actual post-implementation impact of the TFA. This paper provides an assessment, combining econometric...

The WTO has not been able to recover since the collapse of the Doha Round in July 2008. Several ministerial conferences including the Buenos Aires meeting in December 2017 failed to reach agreement. The US Trump Administration launched a campaign to reform the WTO in 2018 and 2019. This book...

The growth of digital trade is dependant upon greater interconnectivity across borders. Several countries strive to achieve such interconnectivity and integration in digital trade through international trade agreements. Digital trade integration is a complex, multidimensional process that...

China ist ein wichtiger Handelspartner der Europäischen Union und zudem neuer Systemwettbewerber. Sorgen bereiten aus europäischer Sicht vor allem die ökonomischen Wettbewerbsverzerrungen durch den chinesischen Staatskapitalismus, die sich zunehmend auch auf den Weltmärkten auswirken....

What is the value of the WTO Committee on Agriculture? How much trade do countries talk about at the WTO? Do low-income countries participate less than they should in the work of the Committee? How important are issues not covered by notifications? What are the most important issues on which to...

Rules-based trade is under attack and the WTO is at risk of marginalization. The COVID-19 pan-demic and its detrimental effects on public health, global supply- and value chains and industrial production, have brought back national export restrictions and stopped the free flow of goods and...

From its initial focus on minimizing waste generation, the circular economy has evolved into a broad-based approach to make resource use more sustainable. A big part of the appeal of a circular economy is the opportunities it creates not only for resource savings and better human health and...

Many different approaches have developed for the evaluation of non-tariff measures (NTMs) and free trade agreements (FTAs). Moving on from models using simple dummy variables, today a range of databases can capture different aspects of NTMs and FTAs. Some assess the depth of FTAs by extracting...

Starting in the 1960s with the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), nontariff measures (NTMs) have been replacing tariffs continuously as the core element of trade negotiations. Today they take centre stage in all EU trade agreements with industrialised and...

In order to ensure transparency and to keep abreast of trade policies in support of sustainability, the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE) mandated the WTO Secretariat to compile and collate all environment-related measures notified to WTO. The database also includes...

The article analyzes Taiwan's legitimacy debate over trade negotiations with China. The theoretical concept of legitimacy is used to assess Taiwan's cross-straits negotiation mechanism and trade agreements. This article argues that Taiwan's current legal framework governing congressional...

Nearly ten years since the official launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an understanding of what the initiative's objectives are consolidated. However, the short-, mid-, and long-term implications of the initiative are less clear. This is reflected in academic research, as well as in...

In response to the reduction in trade policy uncertainty following China's accession to the WTO, U.S. manufacturing firms implemented more conservative capital structures, relying less on debt financing and holding more cash. We identify the effects using cross-sectional variation in exposure as...

The Supreme Court will soon decide an unusual price-fixing case: In re Vitamin C Antitrust Litigation. It is unusual because the defendants – Chinese manufacturers – do not deny they fixed prices; because China claims it ordered them to do so, but this is a controversial fact; because the...

This paper investigates the time-varying effects of partisan conflict (PC) and trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on the energy market from January 2000 to July 2021 by employing a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility. The results show that the pass-through...

Using a newly built soft power index, we examine whether and how soft power affects Chinese firm-level export to the Belt and Road (B&R) countries from 2000 to 2016. We find that soft power has significantly positive effects on both export value and export product types for the B&R countries....

The Brexit vote precipitated the unravelling of the UK’s membership of the world’s deepest economic integration agreement. This paper reviews evidence on the realized economic effects of Brexit. The 2016 Brexit referendum changed expectations about future UK-EU relations. Studying its...

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce industry-level exports by cutting domestic production. We show that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of...