Measuring development, growth and welfare is an important issue in normative and positive economics.The issue is more critical in developing economies where a good statistical indicator of income, livingstandard or poverty is crucial for decision-makers in corporate, government, non-government andinternational organizations in their for-profit or non-profit plans to promote business and trade, ...

This paper examines the welfare implications of an existence of free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) in the GATT system, in the presence of cross-foreign ownership among countries. In particular, two GATT regimes are analyzed: a pure GATT regime without any regional free trade agreements, and modified GATT regime with either an FTA or a CU. This paper argues that, when foreign ...

Agriculture remains a sensitive issue during multilateral trade negotiations within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Similar problems arise at the bilateral level, as in the case of trade talks between the United States and the Dominican Republic. The study explores the determinant of agricultural industry competitiveness in the 21st century, particularly in the case of U.S. and Dominican ag...

Trade poses risks and opportunities to public health nutrition. This paper discusses the potential food-related public health risks of a radical new kind of trade agreement: the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Under negotiation since 2010, the TPP involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the USA, and Vietnam. Here, we review th...

~ S national economies have become increasingly inter-related, national governments have broadened their efforts to coordinate trade-related policies. For years GATT negotiators concentrated on tariff reduction and trade liberalisation. The recently completed Uruguay Round negotiations included a number of agreements in previously uncharted waters (e.g., agreements on government procurement, tr...

Business-to-business electronic commerce (B2B EC) opens up new possibilities of trade. For example, new business partners from around the globe can be found, their offers can be compared, even complex negotiations can be conducted electronically, and a contract can be drawn up and fulfilled via an electronic marketplace. However, a sophisticated data management is required to provide such facti...

Electronic markets are virtual meeting places where buyers and sellers meet and interact to trade products or services. In this paper, we consider an agent-based information system to support the ongoing negotiations among the traders in such a market. The information system's agents are active within certain market categories of which they carry a multi-criteria description. This enables the s...

Although the impact of the EU on the economic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is undisputed, contemporary causal explanations focus primarily on the impact of accession negotiations and conditionality on CEE transformation and, as such, are limited to the post-1997 period. This poses a challenging empirical puzzle, because, in terms of their pace of transition, the CEECs dist...