A barter transaction allows for two parties to exchange goods or services without using money. Direct barter is often referred to as the “double coincidence of wants” and requires that each of the two parties involved in the transaction each have a good satisfying a specific need of the other party. This results in high transaction costs, primarily associated with the search to find the “double...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become an increasingly prominent feature of the international trade environment, with salient examples being the widening and deepening of the European Union (EU), the success of the Mercosur, and the formation of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). In fact, a majority of the active agreements notified to gatt through 1995 were signed in ...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in PTAs go beyond GATS commitments and offers made in the context of the Doha Development Agenda. The dat...

This paper investigates the impact of the US and China’s foreign aids to Africa on trade flows between donor and recipient countries. Evidence from the gravity model estimates reveals that the two donors’ exports are strengthened by their aids to African partners. Interestingly, China’s aid shows a positive effect on its total volume of trade and imports from Africa, while the aid from the US e...

This paper is concerned with the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM), an important policy review function of the WTO. From a developing country perspective, a truly effective TPRM should accomplish several interrelated goals which together should add up to a boost to investor confidence in developing country markets. Several improvements that may move us closer to such a regime are discussed. ...

We explore the consequences of placing the Standard Model gauge fields in the bulk of the recently proposed localized gravity model of Randall and Sundrum. We find that the Kaluza Klein excitations of these fields are necessarily strongly coupled and we demonstrate that current precision electroweak data constrain the lowest states to lie above ' 23 TeV. Taking the weak scale to be ∼ 1 TeV, the...

1. South Africa: Summary of faultlines and action points

We offer a new perspective to the unionised wage effects of unilateral trade liberalisation by considering endogenous domestic market structure. Hence, in contrast to the existing works, which focus on the short-run effects of trade liberalisation on unionised wage, we focus on more long-run effects by considering the effects of trade liberalisation on the domestic market structure. Trade liber...