Over the last couple of decades, there has been a growing awareness in academic and policymaking circles regarding the importance of institutions for economic development. Institutions constitute the rules of the game in a society or, more precisely, the restrictions designed by members of a society to influence human interaction. Any transformation affecting these rules may clearly have a dire...

Globalization of trade, marketing and investment has important implications for public health, both negative and positive. This article considers the implications of the single package of World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements for public health research and policy, focusing on three themes: commodities, intellectual property rights, and health services. The main aims of the analysis are as f...

Feldstein and Horioka (Econ J 90:314–329, 1980) observed that saving and investment move closely together in the major OECD countries. This finding is a puzzle if national economies are characterized by one sector neoclassical production functions—with diminishing returns to capital, a high level of savings in a country should create an incentive to export capital. In this paper, we show that t...

There are three dominant globalization pathways affecting noncommunicable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): urbanization, trade liberalization, and investment liberalization. Urbanization carries potential health benefits due to improved access to an increased variety of food imports, although for the growing number of urban poor, this has often meant increased reliance on cheap, highly pro...

In emissions intensive industries such as iron and cement, manufacturers can invest to reduce carbon emissions. Under carbon regulations, their investment decisions will change the cost structure of production. We study the joint production and investment decisions under command-andcontrol and market-based regulations for a manufacturer. Market-based regulations include carbon tax and cap-and-t...

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model with distortionary taxation and endogenized trade costs. Tax revenues finance a public good, infrastructure. We show that the introduction of costly public investment in infrastructure increases agglomerative tendencies. With respect to the regions’ sizes, in the periphery, the price-index for manufacturing goods decreases, whereas for the core...

Climate policy proposals based on cap and trade mechanisms with tight caps will likely lead to highly volatile CO2 prices. This volatility is ignored in many studies, even though it can be expected to exceed that of natural gas and to exceed the wide ranges in CO2 price forecasts. Volatility will significantly increase investment risk, raise the cost of capital, and make it valuable to defer in...

Abstract On 6 December 2006, Australia and Korea announced a joint study on a possible Australia-Korea free trade agreement (AKFTA) to promote trade and economic relations between the two countries. The paper provides empirical evidence on the possible gains and their transmission mechanism from this agreement. Significantly, it uses a new economic policy modelling approach, the endogenous grav...

this article reviews past developments of the shanghai cooperation organization (sco) and studies its potentialities in the areas of economy, trade, investment, energy and military power. a study conducted on statistical information of the sco state members shows that the organisation has the capacity to be turned into one of the biggest international hubs in the fields of economy, trade, forei...

Despite intergovernmental calls for greater policy coherence to tackle rising non-communicable diseases (NCDs), there has been a striking lack of coherence internationally and nationally between trade and health sectors. In this commentary, I explore the arguments by Lenucha and Thow in relation to barriers for greater coherence for NCDs, apply them to regional trade ag...