As society is transformed by the usc of new technologies, information policy issues cross traditional boundaries to be found in a wide range of decision-making arenas. The New World Information Order (NWIO) debate lies relatively quiescent in Unesco, but surfaces in international trade negotiations in response to the US push to get trade in services, or international information flows, included...

International policies toward protecting intellectual property rights (IPRs) have seen profound changes over the past two decades. Rules on how to protect patents, copyrights, trademarks, and other forms of IPRs have become a standard component of international trade agreements. Most significantly, during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations (1986–94), members of what is today t...

This paper considers the negotiation and enforcement of trade agreements in an environment where countries negotiate repeatedly through time. The idea that countries choose trade policies repeatedly through time has been widely applied in the literature on trade agreements, and has motivated the use of subgame perfect equilibrium as a mechanism for enforcing agreements. We argue that this same ...

Geography causes African countries to experience a ‘proximity gap’. To overcome this gap a ‘big push’ may be needed in infrastructure. The cross-border nature of such infrastructure requires regional cooperation in at least four issues: transport infrastructure, trade facilitation, decentralization and local economic development, and migration. Because incentives for regional cooperation in the...

We argue that the trend toward international investment agreements (IIAs) with stricter investment rules is driven by competitive diffusion, namely defensive moves of developing countries concerned about foreign direct investment (FDI) diversion in favor of competing host countries. Accounting for spatial dependence in the formation of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and preferential trade...

Significant recent attention, in both research and policy realms, has been given to the intersection of international trade and global climate change. Trade presents challenges to climate policy through carbon leakage and competitiveness concerns, but also potential solutions through the use of cooperative trade agreements, technology transfer, or carbon tariffs against recalcitrant nations. Th...