* At the request of its member States, WIPO commissioned, in 2001, five studies on the economic impact of the protection of non-original databases in developing countries and countries in transition. This study, one of those five, contains the research and opinions of only its author and does not in any way reflect the views or position of WIPO. This paper aims at dealing with the impact of the...

With the advent of cross-border electronic commerce, an increasing number of products that have been traded physically in the past are now imported digitally. This raises a number of issues, which are currently debated at the international level: should these products be defined as goods or services; which multilateral trade rules should govern them; and, should they remain tariff and tax exemp...

the wto is an international organization which arranges international commercial rules and disputes settlements. increasingly joining of countries to the wto and movement for freedom of commercial regime in industrial or developing countries are deniable testimonies for globalization. gradual reduction of tariff and competition in exports and internal markets by their advantages have jeopardize...

This paper analyzes the increasing tariff protection in the Spanish iron and steel industry over the first third of the 20th century. Learning effects are explicitly included to model a dynamic game of trade liberalization. The government chooses the tariff level while firms decide how much to produce each period. Firm’s production decisions determine their future cost levels. Assuming that lea...

in this paper the trade restrictiveness of agricultural policies in iran was measured by the triindex for the nine major agricultural products including wheat, rice, barely, maize, soybean,meat (beef meat), soybean oil, sugar and banana over the period 1981 to 2007. the main resultsindicate that there is no trend in above index and high volatility especially in 2006 and 2007years due to conside...

This paper examines the impact of the revocation of tariff exemptions on exports of developing countries using data from cases of the Competitive Needs Limits (CNL), a feature of the US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). CNLs are arguably imposed on “super competitive” GSP beneficiaries and aim to reserve the GSP benefits for other “less competitive” GSP eligible countries. The empirical ...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral ‘iceberg’ trade costs. For 2000, the weighted average tariff equivalent of trade costs ranges from 73% for the North to 134% fo...