This paper discusses the General Agreement on Trade in Services or GATS and assesses some of the key issues and concerns that have been voiced about this agreement, particularly with regard to its implications for policymaking in important social service sectors. The paper provides an overview of the GATS in terms of its key features, structural characteristics, and negotiating modalities. It a...

BACKGROUND The agreement on agriculture and the World Trade Organization were major outcomes of the 1986-1994 Uruguay Round (UR) negotiations within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The measures under the UR were predicted to increase poverty in developing countries, a serious cause for concern since poverty alleviation is a major goal of developing countries. Thus this paper ...

Despite the obvious practical importance of the question, economists did not attempt until the 1990s to assess empirically the effects of international variations in the strength of IPRs. Without such evidence, the field lay open to strong claims on both sides of the debate—a situation that remains largely true today. Thus, for example, advocates of global harmonization of strongly protective s...

We propose a framework based on Hierarchical Clustering (HC) to perform multiagent negotiations where we can specify the type of agreements needed in terms of utility sharing among the agents.The proposed multi-round mediation process is based on the analysis of the agents’ offers at each negotiation round and the generation of a social contract at each round as a feedback to the agents, which ...