T agreement to create a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was one of the major innovations to emerge from the Uruguay round. Trade in services was not covered by the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), even though such trade had always accounted for a non-trivial share of the foreign exchange earnings (expenditures) of many countries. The best estimates available sug...

Trade policy barriers are only one element of the overall trade costs. Due to the decrease in the influence of tariff barriers on trade, institutional barriers may be increasing in relative importance. In this line, this paper compares and quantifies the impact that a number of institutional and policy trade barriers have on bilateral trade flows. Results indicate that institutional trade barri...

T HE main goal of international trade liberalisation is to establish a trading environment in which all firms compete on an equal footing. This includes a concern that all firms should pay the full costs of the inputs that are used in the production process. Where the production generates external costs, the Polluter Pays Principle has been widely accepted as indicating that the firm should bea...

On Feb 4, 2016, after 7 years of negotiations, representatives from the USA, Japan, and ten other countries signed one of the largest trade and investment agreements in years, the Trans-Pacifi c Partnership (TPP). The negotiations were closed to the public, who only glimpsed drafts of the agreement when they were occasionally leaked. The participants were heavily lobbied by major industries. An...

1 Associate Professor of Economics, Faculty of Economics, and Associate Dean, College of Public Health, Chulalongkorn University, Phyathai Street, Bangkok 10330, Thailand. 2 Assistant Professor, Director, Center for Health Economics, Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University. International trade is built around international specialization and based upon comparative advantage. It is usuall...

Developing countries have both offensive and defensive interests in the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations. This paper discusses the extent to which these interests have been addressed in the July 2004 Framework Agreement and in the subsequent negotiations. Many of the key demands of developing countries appear to have been accepted in principle in the Agreement, but the lack of specific deta...

After the Agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) came into operation in 1995 developing countries have found themselves in a process of continual negotiation over intellectual property rights and access to medicines. These negotiations have taken place in the World Trade Organization and in the context of free trade agreements. The paper suggests that the...