Though the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) has failed, the original draft is likely to serve as a basis for future negotiations. This article gives a critical assessment of the draft from an industrial economics point of view. First, I summarize the contents of the agreement which is relevant for market structure and competition. Then I develop the industrial economics approach, whic...

We examine antitrust rules in a two county general equilibrium trade model, contrasting national and multilateral (cooperative) determination of competition policy, exploring the properties of policy equilibrium. It is not imperfect competition, but variation in competitive stance between sectors that matters for trading partners. Beggar-thy-neighbor competition policies relate to countries’ co...

It is no coincidence that in recent years Brazil has been invited to participate (even with a less-than-expected role) in meetings of the group of richest countries, in meetings of several groups of countries concerned with the multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organization, at the same time that former Brazilian authorities often take part in selected groups of experts dealing with ...

South African popular movement analysts and activists participating in African and international civil society meetings on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other multilateral institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, are frequently faced with troubled and troubling questions about the position that the South African government has taken, and what is seen to be the highly questiona...

A class of bargaining games in which agents bargain over prices and maximum trading constraints is considered: It is proved that all the Stationary Subgame Perfect Equilibria of these games implement Walrasian allocations as the bargaining frictions vanish. The result holds for any number of agents and is robust to different specifications of the bargaining process. © 2011 Published by Elsevier...

Federated distributed systems present new challenges to resource management, which cannot be met by conventional systems that employ relatively static resource models and centralized allocators. We previously argued that Matchmaking provides an elegant and robust resource management solution for these highly dynamic environments [5]. Although powerful and flexible, multiparty policies (e.g., co...

A new operating paradigm is still needed for the power industry in order to achieve a workable deregulated market. The two main proposals, namely the Bilateral and the Poolco models, even though their original intents were to promote efficiency in a deregulated industry, in order to be workable need a powerful centralized organization. They consequently end up operating in the same way as the r...

I. IN THE PRESS ............................................................................................... 3 II. MULTILATERAL PROCESSES IN CLIMATE CHANGE ......................................................... 4 Past events .............................................................................................................................. 4 United Nations Framework Convention o...