Cutting The Gordian Knot Of Economic Reform

During the past two decades, governments across the developing world have implemented many liberal economic reforms. 'Cutting the Gordian Knot of Economic Reform' shows that international institutions - formal agreements that govern policy formation in member states - made possible some of the most important reforms in developing countries.

During the past two decades, governments across the developing world have implemented many liberal economic reforms. 'Cutting the Gordian Knot of Economic Reform' shows that international institutions - formal agreements that govern policy formation in member states - made possible some of the most important reforms in developing countries.

International trade has, for decades, been central to economic growth and improved standards of living for nations and regions worldwide. For most of the advanced countries, trade has raised standards of living, while for most emerging economies, growth did not begin until their integration into the global economy. The economic explanation is simple: international trade facilitates specialization, increased efficiency and improved productivity to an extent impossible in closed economies. However, recent years have seen a significant slowdown in global trade, and the global system has increasingly come under attack from politicians on the right and on the left. The benefits of open markets, the continuation of international co-operation, and the usefulness of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund and World Bank have all been called into question. While globalization has had a broadly positive effect on overall global welfare, it has also been perceived by the public as damaging communities and social classes in the industrialized world, spawning, for example, Brexit, and the US exit from the Transpacific Partnership. The purpose of this volume is to examine international and regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which offer like-minded countries a possible means to continue receiving the benefits of economic liberalization and expanded trade. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such agreements, and how can they sustain growth and prosperity for their members in an ever-challenging global economic environment? The Handbook is divided into two parts. The first, Global Themes, offers analysis of issues including the WTO, trade agreements and economic development, intellectual property rights, security and environmental issues, and PTAs and developing countries. The second part examines regional and country-specific agreements and issues, including NAFTA, CARICOM, CETA, the Pacific Alliance, the European Union, EFTA, ECOWAS, the SADC, TTIP, RCEP and the TPP (now the CPTPP), as well as the policies of countries such as Japan and Australia.

The Second Chinese Revolution explores some of the keys to understanding China, a country whose evolution already affects all of us. Beginning in 1978 - when China's GDP was only 6% of the USA's - the author takes us through the different aspects that have played a fundamental role in the country's change: China's eruption in world markets in the background of the West's economic crisis; its obsession with science and technology and its relentless march towards a 'knowledge society'; and a reassessment of the Tiananmen Square events of June 1989 and the ongoing debate on political reform. The book also includes a comparative analysis of the reforms in China and Russia in the last decades.

With contributions from an international range of experts, this cutting-edge Research Agenda collates the most important and emerging research in the field to map out the new directions and promising paths ahead for the international political economy (IPE).

The goal of this first edition of the Assessing Arab Economic Integration Report is to provide a quantitative assessment of regional economic integration efforts, and generate practical and implementable policy advice for Member States. Following a concise review of the potential impact and channels of economic integration, a system of indexes has been developed for performance evaluation, monitoring and comparison of integration at the global, regional, and bilateral levels. This report shows that Arab countries’ abilities to unlock the potential for further intra-regional integration rely partly on their capacity to address a number of cross cutting structural features that act as facilitators and condition their performances. It makes a clear argument that economic integration is a means by which Arab countries can ensure their growth and diversification, thus bringing both individual country-level and communal regional-level benefits.

In the past twenty-five years, a number of countries have made the transition to democracy. The support of international organizations is essential to success on this difficult path. Yet, despite extensive research into the relationship between democratic transitions and membership in international organizations, the mechanisms underlying the relationship remain unclear. With Organizing Democracy, Paul Poast and Johannes Urpelainen argue that leaders of transitional democracies often have to draw on the support of international organizations to provide the public goods and expertise needed to consolidate democratic rule. Looking at the Baltic states’ accession to NATO, Poast and Urpelainen provide a compelling and statistically rigorous account of the sorts of support transitional democracies draw from international institutions. They also show that, in many cases, the leaders of new democracies must actually create new international organizations to better serve their needs, since they may not qualify for help from existing ones.