As manufacturing tariffs have fallen worldwide, the focus of free trade agreements has shifted towards other issues, including: rules governing foreign investment, e-commerce regulations, trade in services, harmonization of technical standards, sanitary and phyto-sanitary regulations, and the streamlining of customs procedures. Japan and Singapore are undertaking negotiations over this kind of ...

We study the ever more integrated and ever more unbalanced trade relationships between European countries. To better capture the complexity of economic networks, we propose two global measures that assess the trade integration and the trade imbalances of the European countries. These measures are the network (or indirect) counterparts to traditional (or direct) measures such as the trade-to-GDP...

This paper deals with the quantification of GMO regulations on bilateral trade flows. A composite index of the ‘complexity’ of such regulations for sixty countries as well as an ‘objective’ score for six GMO regulatory sub-dimensions has been developed. Using a gravity model, we show how bilateral ‘similarity’ in GMO regulations, affect trade flows for the composite index and its components. Re...

How large are the gains from trade? Do all trade models have the ‘same old gains’? Arkolakis, Costinot, and Rodriguez-Clare (2012) show that many quantitative trade models that summarize trade responses via a single elasticity have the same welfare implications. I develop a flexible approach to estimating trade responses using a translog expenditure function, and find welfare results that diffe...

advantage of trading opportunities has always been under contention. Data indicate that the continent’s share of world exports has declined sharply, from about 5.5 percent in 1975 to about 2.5 percent in 2002 (Figure 1). At face value, this declining share points to the increased marginalization of Africa in world trade, but the observed pattern of trade need not be inconsistent with predicted ...

Since its introduction in 1946, the Gravity Model has proven to be a valuable aid in understanding and predicting forces at play in human mobility. Historically, the model has been applied primarily at the intercity and interstate level. In this paper we investigate whether the scope of the model extends to the intra-urban. Using a large dataset of trips made on the London rail network, we deri...

[1] Standing well above the trade wind inversion, Hawaii Island (maximum elevation 4.2 km) splits the northeast trade winds and induces a westerly reverse flow in the wake. Satellite observations and regional model simulations are used to investigate circulation effects on lee cloud formation during summer. Over the island, the cloud distribution is consistent with orographic-induced vertical m...

[1] We formulate and apply a multicommodity network flow node-arc optimization model capable of tracking trade transactions in complex water resource systems. The model uses a simple node to node network connectivity matrix and does not require preprocessing of all possible flow paths in the network. We compare the proposed node-arc formulation with an existing arc-path (flow path) formulation ...

Flow Accounting is a passive monitoring concept implemented in routers that gives insight into tra c behavior and network characteristics. However, processing of Flow Accounting data is a challenging task, especially in large networks where the rate of ow records received at the collector can be very high. We developed a tool for processing of Flow Accounting data written in Java. It provides p...