Developing countries are now the dominant voting bloc in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries, especially the least developed, maintain that the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture did little or nothing to benefit them. While many of these countries have presented proposals in the WTO for revisions to the agreement, most of these countries have limited analytical cap...

T his paper is an attempt investigating the relationship between sanctions implications and geographical shift in trading partners. To this end, we analyze separately foreign trade patterns of two countries namely Iran and Russia - which are under imposed sanctions experience - with two United Nations Regional Groups (The Asia-Pacific and the Western European groups)  using a gravity...

To illustrate these assumptions, let us consider a simple numerical example. Suppose a car is needed for three years; that is, suppose N = 3. At the beginning of the first year, we have a 2-year-old car. The annual cost of operating a car is a function of its age; and this cost function is given by: c(0) = 10, c(1) = 20, c(2) = 40, c(3) = 60, and c(4) = 70. The fact that these costs are increas...

In a two sector extension of the Mortensen-Pissarides model of endogenous job destruction, it is shown that trade liberalization increases both job creation and job destruction in the import competing sector and reduces them in the export sector. Since trade liberalization increases unemployment in the import competing sector and reduces it in the export sector, the impact on economywide unempl...

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...