Motivated by the German postal market, this paper analyzes the effects of regulatory uncertainty about labor costs for investment into a liberalized market. We distinguish between the external investment margin (market entry) and the internal investment margin (technology) and establish that regulatory uncertainty affects these margins differently, encouraging market entry but discouraging inve...

BACKGROUND Reforms in the health-care sector, including the pharmacy sector, can have different rationales. The Swedish pharmacies were prior to 2009 organized in a state-owned monopoly. In 2009, a liberalization of the ownership took place, in which a majority of the pharmacies were sold to private owners. The rationales for this liberalization changed profoundly during the preparatory work, m...

Market access liberalization has influenced product-specific growth of world exports and contributed to the shift in the structure of world exports of manufactures towards electrical and electronic goods (including parts and components), goods that require high R&D expenditures, and labour-intensive products such as clothing. Multilateral trade liberalization has strongly improved market access...

Cross-country studies associate financial liberalization with increases in aggregate productivity. This paper argues that this finding can be mainly attributed to reductions in distortions in capital markets that promote competition and encourage firms’ investments in technology. I first develop a simple small open economy model in which capital controls distort access to international borrowin...

Paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration mandates to the liberalization of environmental goods and services. This mandate offers a good opportunity to put climate-friendly goods and services on a fast track to liberalization. Agreement on this paragraph should represent one immediate contribution that the WTO can make to fight against climate change. This paper presents the key iss...

This paper examines the relationship of financial liberalization and stock markets integration among ASEAN-5 (Note 1) stock markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Three sample periods are covered based on the progress of financial liberalization. By using Johansen and Juselius multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger-causality tests and variances decomposit...

This paper addresses the effects of economic transition policies on forestry in China. The effects of de-collectivization and market liberalization on the forest land area and timber harvest are studied using panel data from four provinces covering the period 1978]1995. Fixed effects ordinary least squares models for forest land cover and annual harvests per hectare are estimated, allowing for ...

We study the investment behavior of foreign investors in association with an equity market liberalization, and find a strong link between foreigners trading and local market returns. In the period following the liberalization, net purchases by foreign investors induced a permanent increase in stock prices, suggesting that local firms reduced their cost of equity capital. We also find a strong l...