Morocco is about to start implementing an Association Agreement with the European Union (AAEU) at the same time as the country adjusts its trade policies to conform to WTO rules. A major policy question facing Morocco's policy makers is whether and to what extent they should pursue additional unilateral trade liberalization. Given that Morocco's agriculture currently enjoys substantial protecti...

Liberalization is not a spontaneous process the outcome which should be accepted as inevitable as if it is a destiny. On the contrary, liberalization should be considered as a problem of designing an economic mechanism and finding the most appropriate transition path for the economy, under specific environmental conditions. Within this framework one can distinguish well versus ill designed prog...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level “ability” and firmproduct-level “expertise”, both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm’s payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm’s productiv...

In this paper we deal with the European electricity market liberalization problem, formulated as a game with electricity producers as players, while the consumers’ electricity demand is exogenous. The producers maximize their profit by choosing how much electricity they will produce individually by means of electricity production available to them. The aim of the research presented in this pape...

Although it is often argued that liberalization provides opportunities for growth and development in all over the world, there are divergent views about the effects of agricultural trade liberalization on growth and income distribution in developing countries. The developing countries’ main complaint in this regard is that trade distorting activities in agriculture by developed countries advers...

Hecksher-Ohlin model predicts that gains to trade should flow to abundant factors, which suggests that in developing countries, unskilled labor would benefit most from trade liberalization. The rising skill-premium in the US is often cited in support of standard trade theory. However, these predictions have been challenged by Cunat and Maffezzoli (2001) and Kremer and Maskin (2003). According t...

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the innovation incentives of firms, and what this implies for industry productivity and social welfare. For this purpose we develop a reciprocal dumping model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D. We identify two effects of trade liberalization on productivity: a direct effect through changes in R&D investment, a...

The 1990s was the decade of privatization and deregulation. Although the strategy was largely pioneered in the mature Western economies, the notion that liberalization could improve economic efficiency and at the same time generate income streams that could alleviate fiscal imbalances was rapidly extended to developing countries. Private sector investors would pay to acquire publicly owned asse...

Since the mid-1980s, power sector liberalization has been embraced at different levels in the east Asian countries of China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The dominant rationale underlying power liberalization has been a quest for efficiency improvements, to be achieved by substituting private market activity for public regulations and by opening a country’s electricity system to the global ec...

The post-communist transition was associated with two specific phenomena. First, political liberalization was initiated simultaneously with economic reforms. Second, instead of a short Jshaped adjustment, most transition countries experienced deep and protracted recessions. Some analysts suggest that the early introduction of democracy was in fact harmful for economic growth. Similarly, propone...