GATS and the Regulation of Trade in Services

This collection of essays takes stock of the key challenges that have arisen since the entry into force of the General Agreement on Trade in Services in the mid-1990s and situates them in the context of the WTO's Doha Development Agenda and the proliferation of preferential agreements addressing services today. The multidisciplinary approach provides an opportunity for many of the world's leading experts and a number of new analytical voices to exchange ideas on the future of services trade and regulation. Cosmopolitan approaches to the treatment of labour mobility, the shape of services trade disciplines in the digital age and pro-competitive regulation in air transport are explored with a view to helping readers gain a better understanding of the forces shaping the changes. An essential read for all those concerned with the evolution of the rules-based trading system and its impact on the service economy.

European Union Meets South Korea: Bureaucratic Interests, Exporter Discrimination and the Negotiations of Trade Agreements

Who in the European Union drives the process of pursuing bilateral trade negotiations? In contrast to societal explanations, this article develops a novel argument as to how the European Commission manages the process and uses its position in strategic ways to pursue its interests. Rooted in principal–agent theory, the article discusses agent preferences and theorizes the conditions under which the agent sets specific focal points and interacts strategically with principals and third parties. The argument is discussed with case study evidence drawn from the first trade agreement concluded and ratified since the EU Commission announced its new strategy in 2006: the EU–South Korea trade agreement

The volume of positive braid links

Based on recent work by Futer, Kalfagianni and Purcell, we prove that the volume of sufficiently complicated positive braid links is proportional to the signature defect Δσ = 2g−σ.

An Enabling Regulatory Environment for Sustainable Investment: The Example of Trade Law

There is broad international agreement that investment flows to the agricultural sector in developing countries need to be increased. But there is also agreement that such investments need to be sustainable. For being sustainable, they must not only be beneficial to the public economy, but also to rural households and to the environment in the short and the long run. Whether sustainable investments take place, not least depends on the legal framework within which these investments are situated. This is true for the domestic legal frameworks of both the home country and of the host country of the investment. But also the international legal frameworks in which home and host states are embedded set either positive or negative incentives for investments to be sustainable. The paper presents an overview on regulatory frameworks which come to focus in this regard. It then elaborates on international agricultural trade regulation, by assuming that sustainable investments in agriculture presume a ‘sustainable trade regime’. By doing so, the paper presents parts of the debate about a sustainable agricultural trade regime, as it has been resumed and further developed by the author in recent years. Key words. Agricultural sector, sustainable investment, regulatory environment, sustainable trade regime.

The Framework of Trade in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

This paper establishes an overview of the variables and constraints that affected trade in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. It explores the origins of COMECON, the demographic and resource distribution of the member nations, and the role of trade in a centrally planned economy. The paper’s primary focus is on the emergence of a bilateral trade structure, the faulty price mechanism, and the nonconvertibility of currencies. The paper documents the origins and relationships between the constraints of trade within COMECON, and argues that ultimately, these constraints prevented COMECON from fully achieving its economic objectives.

The Effects of Trade Orientation and Human Capital on Total Factor Productivity

We study the effects of trade orientation and human capital on total factor productivity for a pooled cross-section, time-series sample of developed and developing countries. We first estimate total factor productivity from a parsimonious specification of the aggregate production function involving output per worker, capital per worker, and the labor force, both with and without the stock of human capital. Then we consider a number of potential determinants of total factor productivity growth including several measures of trade orientation as well as a measure of human capital. We find that a high degree of openness benefits total factor productivity and that human capital contributes to total factor productivity only after our measure of openness passes some threshold level. Before that threshold, increases in human capital actually depress total factor productivity. Finally, we also consider the issue of convergence of real GDP per worker and total factor productivity, finding more evidence of convergence for the latter than for the former.

The middle-income trap from the viewpoint of trade structures

In this study, we try to elucidate the middle-income trap from the viewpoint of international trade. We conduct regression analyses on the relationship between income level and net export ratios for different types of goods for trapped and non-trapped samples separately. Our findings indicate that industrial upgrading appears to occur exactly as depicted by the flying-geese model for non-trapped countries while trapped countries tend to depend on the export of primary commodities, and industrialization appears to be driven by forward linkages to processed goods and a narrow base. The results of our analyses suggest that the middle-income trap is a form of Dutch disease or a 'resource curse' in the middle-income stage.

Establishing global value chains through the liberalization of trade in services

This paper addresses the importance of establishing global value chains through the liberalization of trade in services. A database has revealed rather disconnected policy arrangements across APEC members in terms of service trade liberalization. While the economic benefits arising from harmonized and liberalized policy across APEC members are widely recognized in the business sector, relevant policy coordination seems to be missing. With this in mind, APEC could work on establishing its own harmonized "service trade commitment table" that would be centered on simple foreign capital participation criteria. This would surely contribute to forming an APEC-wide global value chain.

Assessment of the Association of Health with the Liberalisation of Trade in Services under the World Trade Organisation

Background: The liberalisation of trade in services which began in 1995 under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has generated arguments for and against its potential health effects. Our goal was to explore the relationship between the liberalisation of services under the GATS and three health indicators – life expectancy (LE), under-5 mortality (U5M) and maternal mortality (MM) - since the WTO was established. Methods and Findings: This was a cross-sectional ecological study that explored the association in 2010 and 1995 between liberalisation and health (LE, U5M and MM), and between liberalisation and progress in health in the period 1995–2010, considering variables related to economic and social policies such as per capita income (GDP pc), public expenditure on health (PEH), and income inequality (Gini index). The units of observation and analysis were WTO member countries with data available for 2010 (n = 116), 1995 (n = 114) and 1995–2010 (n = 114). We conducted bivariate and multivariate linear regression analyses adjusted for GDP pc, Gini and PEH. Increased global liberalisation in services under the WTO was associated with better health in 2010 (U5M: 20.358 p,0.001; MM: 20.338 p = 0.001; LE: 0.247 p = 0.008) and in 1995, after adjusting for economic and social policy variables. For the period 1995–2010, progress in health was associated with income equality, PEH and per capita income. No association was found with global liberalisation in services. Conclusions: The favourable association in 2010 between health and liberalisation in services under the WTO seems to reflect a pre-WTO association observed in the 1995 data. However, this liberalisation did not appear as a factor associated with progress in health during 1995–2010. Income equality, health expenditure and per capita income were more powerful determinants of the health of populations.