Life after Bali: renewing the world trade negotiating agenda. Bruegel Policy Contribution 2013/17, December 2013

The crisis has contributed to a slowdown in global trade volumes, with trade virtually stagnant in the twelve months to July 2013. In this context, fruitful negotiations in the World Trade Organisation’s 9th Ministerial Conference in Bali are crucial to sustain the institution’s credibility and prove that multilateral negotiations can still deliver success. WTO trade talks are the only ongoing trade liberalisation process that has development at its core. The Doha mini-package under consideration at Bali is a collection of watered-down but deliverable elements of a deal comprising agriculture, trade facilitation and special and differential treatment/less developed country concessions. Post-Bali, the WTO should aim to reverse the current disenchantment with multilateral trade negotiations. This means formulating a relevant trade negotiating agenda with an understanding of global value chains at its core. However, the transition to the new agenda requires a closure of the ongoing Round. The easiest way to conclude the Doha Round would be to select another discrete set of deliverables that fulfills the development commitment of the Doha Development Agenda, thus paving the way for a new Round.

A Life Cycle Approach to Investor Protection. ECMI Working Paper No. 1/September 2014

The market for investment products, including both securities and investment funds, is fraught with difficulties for consumers in terms of the ease of comparing products, trust in suppliers and consumer satisfaction. A comprehensive approach to investor protection, developed around the lifecycle of a financial product, may offer the investor greater protection during an investment’s life span. This paper proposes a new approach to investor protection, building on a review of major market failures affecting the origination, distribution and sale of financial products and based on a review of the relevant scientific literature and country experiences. The application of a ‘know-your-product’ principle at origination, a narrower ‘default rule’ for best execution and an ex-ante distinction between advice and ‘information-only’ services are among the options discussed in this paper to enhance the investor protection framework over the lifecycle of a financial product.

Can Policy Make Us Happier? Individual characteristics socioeconomic factors, and life satisfaction in Central and Eastern Europe. Bruges European Economic Research (BEER) Papers 22/November 2011

In the last decade, Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have witnessed a rapid economic convergence vis-à-vis Western Europe. However, this rapid growth has not been matched by a similarly rapid increase in life satisfaction, which has remained low in the European context. This paper sets out to address this conundrum, by looking at the individual and macro-level determinants of individual life satisfaction in ten CEE countries. The results highlight that while Central and Eastern Europeans share the same individual determinants of happiness as people in the West (despite some significant cross-country variation), macroeconomic and institutional differences are the key factors behind the lack of convergence in life satisfaction. On the macroeconomic side, GDP growth is still a source of increasing well-being, but the happiness bonus associated with it is becoming smaller. The different levels of individual happiness in CEE are therefore mostly determined by institutional factors such as corruption, government spending and decentralisation, making policies aimed at enhancing institutional quality capable of bringing about substantial improvements in the overall life satisfaction of the people in the region.