Events of the past two decades have generated increasing concern about the direction of the world trading system. While the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) helped orchestrate the substantial reduction in tariffs after World War II, the multilateral approach to trade liberalisation has encountered difficulty in stemming the proliferation of non-tariff trade barriers and in extendin...

Mark Hall and John Purcell IRRU recently completed a major research project investigating organisational responses to the Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations. Here we highlight the main findings. The focus is on the factors underlying the different approaches to information and consultation identified among the participating organisations, in particular the central role ...

Already, the formation of the WTO did not halt the proliferation of new RTAs. There has been an enormous increase in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) in the last twenty years. In fact, RTAs legitimacy is well recognised under GATT/WTO. By their very nature, such arrangements favour imports from members of the grouping and discriminate against imports from other countries. This departure fro...

The Asia Pacific region was characterized in the second half of the twentieth century by an absence of regional trading arrangements. The situations changed after 2000, raising questions of sequencing and of the boundaries of the region. This paper argues that the proliferation of regional and bilateral agreements has been driven by the rapid emergence of regional value chains and centres on tr...

How do changes in competitive intensity affect trade patterns? Models of collusive arrangements in spatially separated markets generate testable predictions of the effects of collusion on price, trade patterns and concentration. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment associated with increased anti-trust enforcement activity over the last two decades to test these predictions. In particular, we a...

Over the last three decades, membership in regional trade arrangements has become one of the most important tools of trade diplomacy. Regional agreements bring a lot of benefits for the member countries through reducing barriers and restrictions. Considering the signing of the Interim PTA Agreement between Iran and Eurasia and its effects, this study aimed to investigate the economic effects of...

This is a background paper prepared for an informal expert meeting of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. It discusses technical assistance on trade for the least developed and poorer countries and tries to explore alternative partnership approaches for building new trade capacity. It focuses on trade policy more than on trade promotion strategies. The paper identifies four differ...

Problems often arise when partners in regional integration agreements (RIA) have divergent exchange rate policies, as has happened in recent years with the Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur). The January 1999 devaluation of the Brazilian real strained the relationship between Argentina and Brazil, setting off a series of events that included protectionist measures in Argentina, Argentine bu...

During the 1990s, wage setting increasingly became coordinated in many Member States of the European Union (EU), often through new arrangements involving broad encompassing social pacts between employers, trade unions, and governments striking deals across policy areas from wages to social and employment policies. We argue that the different forms of institutional innovation in wage setting fou...