Trade policies create both 'winners' and 'losers', as some actors stand to benefit and others are left behind. More often than not, it has been women who have borne the negative impacts of ...international trade policy and it is thus imperative that future trade policy is negotiated and implemented with an eye toward women's interests. This collection represents an innovative systematic evaluation of the debate relating to international trade law, policy, and gender equality. It analyses the role of WTO as a trade policy setter, current debates and possibilities for gender-inclusive trade agreements and emerging topics such as e-commerce and gender-responsive standards. With a range of interdisciplinary contributions and national and regional case studies, this collection offers a comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the intersections between trade law and gender, and is vital to ensuring that both men and women 'win' from trade policy in the future. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This book offers a compelling new interpretation of the proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) at the end of the twentieth century. Challenging the widespread assumption that RTAs should ...be seen as fundamentally similar economic initiatives to pursue free trade, Francesco Duina proposes that the world is reorganizing itself into regions that are highly distinctive and enduring. With evidence from Europe, North America, and South America, he challenges our understanding of globalization, the nature of markets, and the spread of neoliberalism.
The pursuit of free trade is a profoundly social process and, as such, a unique endeavor wherever it takes place. In an unprecedented comparative analysis, the book offers striking evidence of differences in the legal architectures erected to standardize the worldview of market participants and the reaction of key societal organizations--interest groups, businesses, and national administrations--to a broader marketplace. The author gives special attention to developments in three key areas of economic life: women in the workplace, the dairy industry, and labor rights. With its bold and original approach and its impressive range of data,The Social Construction of Free Traderepresents a major advance in the growing fields of economic sociology and comparative regional integration.
The standard gravity model predicts that trade flows increase in proportion to importer and exporter total income, regardless of how income is divided into income per capita and population. Bilateral ...trade data, however, show that trade grows strongly with income per capita and is largely unresponsive to population. I develop a general equilibrium Ricardian model of trade that allows the elasticity of trade with respect to income per capita and with respect to population to diverge. Goods are of various types, which differ in their income elasticity of demand and in the extent to which there is heterogeneity in their production technologies. I estimate the model using bilateral trade data of 162 countries and compare it to a special case that delivers the gravity equation. The general model improves the restricted model's predictions regarding variations in trade due to size and income. I experiment with counterfactuals. A positive technology shock in China makes poor and rich countries better off and middle-income countries worse off.
As anti-globalization and geopolitical tensions continue to rise, the use of local content requirements (LCRs) around the world has become more noticeable than ever before. The reasons for adopting ...LCRs range from ensuring domestic supply availability, job creation, and increasing value added to safeguarding national security. Ing and Grossman examine country-specific as well as firm-product level exercises to explain how LCRs reduce fair competition, resulting in lower trade and productivity, which ultimately lowers world economic output and overall human welfare. Countries around the world are investigated with specific attention to the US, China, Indonesia, and resource-intensive countries, including mining-intensive ones. The book also presents product- and firm-level analyses, answering the question of why countries adopted LCRs and how LCRs actually affect the world economy. This book is a useful resource that will interest policymakers, researchers, and advanced undergraduates interested in international trade, industrial policy, political economy, labour economics, and development economics.
Sub-Saharan Africa's growth performance during the past three years has been the best in more than three decades, and higher oil revenues and increased debt relief have been used to make progress ...toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite spending pressures, most countries have managed to preserve macroeconomic stability with policies intended to support and sustain the region's higher growth. This latest REO is complemented by analyses on the macroeconomic challenges for oil producers, the changing trade patterns, including with China, and the development of government debt markets.
We build into a Ricardian model sectoral linkages, trade in intermediate goods, and sectoral heterogeneity in production to quantify the trade and welfare effects from tariff changes. We also propose ...a new method to estimate sectoral trade elasticities consistent with any trade model that delivers a multiplicative gravity equation. We apply our model and use our estimated elasticities to identify the impact of NAFTA's tariff reductions. We find that Mexico's welfare increases by 1.31%, U.S.'s welfare increases by 0.08%, and Canada's welfare declines by 0.06%. We find that intra-bloc trade increases by 118% for Mexico, 11% for Canada, and 41% for the U. S. We show that welfare effects from tariff reductions are reduced when the structure of production does not take into account intermediate goods or input-output linkages. Our results highlight the importance of sectoral heterogeneity, intermediate goods, and sectoral linkages for the quantification of the welfare gains from tariffs reductions.
Since 1999, intensive research efforts have vastly increased what is known about the history of coerced migration of transatlantic slaves. A huge database of slave trade voyages from Columbus's era ...to the mid-nineteenth century is now available on an open-access Web site, incorporating newly discovered information from archives around the Atlantic world. The groundbreaking essays in this book draw on these new data to explore fundamental questions about the trade in African slaves. The research findings-that the size of the slave trade was 14 percent greater than had been estimated, that trade above and below the equator was largely separate, that ports sending out the most slave voyages were not in Europe but in Brazil, and more-challenge accepted understandings of transatlantic slavery and suggest a variety of new directions for important further research.
For the most complete database on slave trade voyages ever compiled, visit www.slavevoyages.org.
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