While there is evidence that politics matter for international cooperation, the impact on economic integration of the quality of institutions has been given short shrift in the previous literature. I argue that the quality of institutions—control of corruption and enforcement of the rule of law, in particular—raises the quantity and the quality of information available to potential member state...

The EU is in a prime position trade but faces an onslaught of challenges where weakened open trading order, recent shocks with impacts on the international economic system (the Covid-19 pandemic, Ukraine war, climate change), geopolitics and changing globalization patterns combine. This article (and special issue) takes stock what we have learned summarizes how policy copes new challenges. It b...

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

This paper proposes an approach for optimally accessing data by coordinating services according to Service Level Agreements (SLA) for answering queries. We assume that services produce spatio-temporal data through Application Programming Interfaces (API’s). Services produce data periodically and in batch. Assuming that there is no full-fledged DBMS providing data management functions, query eva...

Recent urbanization processes have been dramatically transformed by factors both external and internal to the urban system: increased globalization and economic competition; the realignment of trade and capital flows; demographic transitions, characterized by declining fertility levels and increased immigration; fluctuations in commodity prices; technological innovations; a reduction in the cos...

Over the past decade, Chinese local governments have adopted numerous innovations to address pressing social, economic, and environmental concerns. Realizing the limitations of unilateral actions, local governments increasingly rely on inter-local collaborations to address these issues at a regional level. Nevertheless, the theoretical and empirical study of regional collaborations in China has...

Since 1990 the number of preferential trade agreements has increased rapidly. Our argument explains this phenomenon, known as the new regionalism, as a result of competition for market access. Exporters that face trade diversion because of their exclusion from a preferential trade agreement concluded by foreign countries push their governments into signing an agreement with the country in which...

This paper examines the hypothesis that corporatist intermediation by party governments facilitates incomes policy formation and is effective in reaching agreements between employers and trade unions as well. A social democratic party in government would positively enhance this process. Investigating this for the Netherlands between –, two puzzles emerge. The first puzzle is that coalit...

Cloud providers may not always fulfil the Service Level Agreements with the clients because of outages in the data centre or inaccurate resource provisioning. Minimizing the Probability of Failure of the tasks that are allocated within a Cloud Infrastructure can be economically infeasible because overprovisioning resources increases the cost and is economically inefficient. This paper intends t...

BACKGROUND Trade agreements are increasingly recognised as playing an influential role in shaping national food environments and the availability and nutritional quality of the food supply. Global monitoring of food environments and trade policies can strengthen the evidence base for the impact of trade policy on nutrition, and support improved policy coherence. Using the INFORMAS trade monitor...