Despite widespread belief that membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) improves the quality of governance, there is no convincing empirical evidence. Here, we investigate whether WTO membership has a causal effect on firm-level reports of political corruption using a nonparametric partial identification approach to bound the average treatment effect (ATE). We also analyze conditional A...

Abstract Failure to reestablish an effective World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure, stop the erosion of multilateral rules and end China–US trade war causes capitals rethink policy. One response is redouble efforts strike agreements with major trading partners. Already countries accounting for about 78% world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are members mega-regional agreement...

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms* China’s policy-makers argued that WTO accession and the accompanying trade liberalization would have a beneficial impact on the domestic economy. China’s import tariffs differed tremendously across industry in the earlier years, but converged to an almost uniform low level after WTO entry. We exploit sectoral variation in the extent ...

The majority of WTO members are now developing countries. Yet, until the launch of the Doha Development Round, their interests remained on the periphery of multilateral trade negotiations. Because development is at the center of the Doha Round, developing countries must seize the moment to obtain an agreement that promotes their integration into the world economy and provides an opportunity to ...

The recent emergence of Joint Statement Initiatives (JSIs) – that is, negotiating initiatives among a subset the World Trade Organization (WTO) membership has reignited debate over lawmaking in WTO. As things stand, WTO operates on basis widespread expectation consensus needs to be achieved for any decision taken. Agreements produce rights and obligations only (‘plurilaterals’, or Annex 4 agree...

It has been widely recognized in both the US and EU that in order to construct agricultural policy packages that are both politically sustainable and in compliance with the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is necessary to incorporate environmental provisions into these packages. The goal of this proposal is to investigate and compare the trend toward melding agricultural a...

China’s joining of WTO in 2001 has completely changed its economic structure and its entry in WTO proved to be a landmark event in the global economy. As a result, China’s trade relations with the world have improved significantly particularly with India. Both, India and China are the fastest growing economies in the world since they have grown at rate of 8% and 10% GDP respectively. The total ...