granting of intellectual property rights on biological materials could be very contentious issue from cultural, legal, ethical and religious points of view. this could be even more complicated, once it acquires an international dimension. the agreement on trade related intellectual property rights (trips) is the latest international arrangement under which, a complex structure for international...

The pursuit of sustainable development requires balancing the objectives of FDI, Trade, economic growth and environmental protection. Achieving a balance between these often-conflicting priorities is difficult enough at the national level, where competing interests are at least grounded in a common environmental, social and economic context. At the international level, where different countries...

Tariff bindings and administered protection are two characteristics of the WTO that are little understood. Tariff bindings place a ceiling on tariffs that is not always reached, while administered protection ensures that all sectors have access to some minimum import protection, effectively creating a floor for protection. How do these policies affect applied MFN tariff rates that are enacted t...

This paper seeks to establish empirically that institutions matter to financial markets. To this end, I look at the impact of five different regional trade agreements (RTAs) on a composite of four different financial instruments that account for default risk on sovereign debt in developing countries. As expected, some of the agreements have a stronger impact on default risk than others. Althoug...

In this paper we compare and contrast the political viability of bilateral Free Trade Area (FTA) Agreements in the presence of tariffs and quotas. Assuming that the government maximizes a weighted sum of welfare and producer profits, we show that the political viability of FTAs varies according to whether trade restrictions take the form of tariffs or quotas. A key result is that whereas an FTA...

As economists have known since Adam Smith, free trade should benefit all nations by allowing them to take advantage of gains from specialization.1 Indeed, the benefits of trade are supposed to justify unilateral liberalization: as the late British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, if your trading partner throws rocks into his harbor, that is no reason to throw rocks into your own. While un...

s: In this paper, our focus is to see the impact of imperfect international capital mobility on tariff adjustment process between two countries. Assuming complete specialization of each country, the results show that the existence of an imperfect international capital market may trigger a gradual tariff adjustment. That is, when it takes time and causes idle capital in reallocating capital betw...