Trade In The Global Economy

This report discusses the benefits of trade facilitation - meant to promote transparent, predictable and straightforward border procedures so as to expedite the movement of goods. The OECD Trade Facilitation indicators provide a powerful tool for assessing the impact of related reforms and moni

Offers insights into what it means to trade in knowledge in today's technological and commercial environment.

Economists explore the relationship between expanding international trade and the parallel growth in illicit trade, including illegal drugs, smuggling, and organized crime. As international trade has expanded dramatically in the postwar period--an expansion accelerated by the opening of China, Russia, India, and Eastern Europe--illicit international trade has grown in tandem with it. This volume uses the economist's toolkit to examine the economic, political, and social problems resulting from such illicit activities as illegal drug trade, smuggling, and organized crime. The contributors consider several aspects of the illegal drug market, including the sometimes puzzling relationships among purity, price, and risk; the effect of globalization on the heroin and cocaine markets, examined both through mathematical models and with empirical data from the U.K; the spread of khat, a psychoactive drug imported legally to the U.K. as a vegetable; and the economic effect of the "war on drugs" on producer and consumer countries. Other chapters examine the hidden financial flows of organized crime, patterns of smuggling in international trade, Iran's illicit trading activity, and the impact of mafia-like crime on foreign direct investment in Italy.

This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and income in the past four decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the 2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of slow growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also because of a structural change in the trade-GDP relationship in recent years. The available evidence suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of international vertical specialization rather than increasing protection or the changing composition of trade and GDP.

Reveals how global trade shaped early modern economic, social and political development, and inaugurated the first era of globalization.

This book provides one of the first interdisciplinary reviews of the relationship between services, globalisation and trade liberalisation as we enter the twenty-first century. Written by academics and policymakers, it contains a detailed analysis of the characteristics of service trade and of recent and current service trade negotiations.

Takes stock of current challenges to the world trading system and develops scenarios for the future.

This wide-ranging collection of previously published articles by Raymond Vernon reflects a portion of the diverse subjects on which he has worked during his career. In the past 20 years, the author has pioneered the study of two major economic institutions which have played important roles in today's global economy: the multinational corporation and the state-owned enterprise. His recent thoughts on these subjects are well-represented in this volume. Co-published with the Harvard Center for International Affairs.