The inherent tension between trade preferences and the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) principle has been mainly examined in the context of regional free trade agreements and customs unions. Much less attention has been given to non-reciprocal special trade preferences given by developed countries to developing countries. WTO rules on these special preferences are less explicit than WTO rules govern...

Within the next twelve to twenty-four months, the World Trade Organization (WTO) may have to rule on a dispute between the United States and the European Communities (EC) regarding genetically modified organisms (GMO). This Article explains why the organization’s current jurisprudence risks making this case and others like it an unnecessarily explosive and damaging one for the trading system. E...

Abstract Joins are essential and potentially expensive operations in database management systems. When data is associated with time periods, joins commonly include predicates that require pairs of argument tuples to overlap order qualify for the result. Our goal enable built-in systems support such joins. In particular, we present an approach where formulated as unions range joins, which more g...

Efficient evaluation of user queries is very important and critical in database applications involving very large amount of data. In these applications, especially the ones where query answers are expected in real time, performance of query evaluation in a DBMS may be poor; often in such cases, query performance is extremely sensitive to the structure of the database schema. For example, if a q...

Abstract The focus of International Investment policymaking in the global South has been shifting from investment protection to facilitation (IF). This movement marks an attempt improve attractiveness national economies for foreign direct (FDI) and recover policy space previously curbed by traditional clauses. popularity led beginning a negotiation process at World Trade Organization (WTO) form...

Using bilateral trade data for 210 countries over the period 1948-2003, this paper attempts to shed some light on the relationship between the WTO and members' trade volatilities. We find that the trade among WTO members tends to be more stable than the trade outside the WTO, and there is strong evidence of interdependence of trade volatilities. The results show comovement of trade volatilities...