The 'Belt and Road' initiative announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 aims at reviving the ancient trade routes connecting China to Europe and Africa: the '21st Century Maritime Silk Road' and the inland 'Silk Road Economic Belt'. Both maritime and land routes of the New Silk Road meet Europe in the Baltics - a region accounting for some 150 million inhabitants representing 30% of the total EU population. The maritime route enters Europe through the Mediterranean Sea before reaching the largest European seaports of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea up to Saint Petersburg in Russia. The land route starting from West China crosses Central Asia, Russia and Belarus before reaching the shores of the Baltic Sea.This book focuses on the business and economic dimensions of China's initiative: Chinese government objective and policies, the strategies of Chinese and foreign firms along the Silk Road, trade and investment between China and Nordic-Baltic countries, the Eurasia Land Bridge corridors and logistics, the impact of the New Silk Road on the economies of Central Asia, new institutions financing the 'Belt and Road', cross-cultural challenges and Sino-foreign joint ventures along the New Silk Road. The direct impact of China's initiative on economic sectors such as logistics services; the shipping, port management and maritime industry; construction and high-speed train; energy and engineering; and e-commerce, information technology and tourism will be assessed.Readers will be provided with an in-depth analysis of the opportunities and challenges for companies and regions along the New Silk Road as well as 17 short case studies focusing on China-led projects currently developed along the 'Belt and Road' and 15 maps of the New Silk Road, the Baltic Sea Region and Central Asia to help in understanding China's vision and strategic moves.

Negotiations between governments shape the world political economy and in turn the lives of people everywhere. Developing countries have become far more influential in talks in the World Trade Organization, including infamous stalemates in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003, as well as bilateral and regional talks like those that created NAFTA. Yet social science does not understand well enough the process of negotiation, and least of all the roles of developing countries, in these situations. This 2006 book sheds light on three aspects of this otherwise opaque process: the strategies developing countries use; coalition formation; and how they learn and influence other participants' beliefs. This book will be valuable for many readers interested in negotiation, international political economy, trade, development, global governance, or international law. Developing country negotiators and those who train them will find practical insights on how to avoid pitfalls and negotiate better.

The year 2015 witnessed significant events in the area of finance, trade and investment, which brought Asia to the centre of the world stage. The Trans-Pacific Partnership reached its basic agreement among the 12 member countries in October; the Chinese Yuan was included into the Special Drawing Rights basket of currencies at the International Monetary Fund in November; the ASEAN Economic Community came into force; and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was established with the 57 founding members in December. Within and outside the region, there is an urgent need to understand the underlying economic structures that brought about these events, which have global implications. The Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore launched a series of conferences on 'Evolving Finance, Trade and Investment in Asia' with the aim of strengthening research capacity in Asia to influence regional policymaking. Looking forward, the conference will provide an annual platform for scholars to discuss the latest findings and to disseminate them to business leaders and policymakers. This book contains scholarship presented at the inaugural international conference in September 2015, and was originally published as a special issue of the International Economic Journal.

This title was first published in 2001. This informative volume gives penetrating insight into why multinational enterprises (MNEs) headquartered in Spain invested so heavily in Latin America in the 1990s. This is an invaluable resource for scholars of international political economics, international relations, economics, business and development studies and those with an interest in Spain and Latin America.

This title was first published in 2001. The contributors to this book examine how changing political borders and disappearing obstacles in transport have led to diverging patterns of interaction between European regions, with different outcomes.trajectories are identified and analyzed.

South Asia today is among the most unstable regions in the world, riddled by both intra- and inter-state conflict. This book presents a comprehensive technical analysis of the trade-conflict relationship within the region, and explores how South Asia demonstrates underperformance of its potential for economic integration. Using the gravity model framework, the book highlights quantitative estimates of the cost of conflict in terms of loss of trade for South Asia. Other variables representative of political and economic regimes are also included to make the model comprehensive, and the book goes on to discuss how the analysis reveals the overriding significance of the India-Pakistan relationship in the regional landscape. It looks at how the results of the econometric exercise reveal the extent to which a common border, when disputed, becomes a barrier rather than a facilitator to trade and, additionally, the extent to which long standing and persistent conflict can debilitate trade relationships. The book is a useful contribution for students and scholars of South Asian studies and international political economy, and assists in formulating policy to correct the anti-home bias that is evident in trade patterns of the South Asian economies.

Between the 1930s and the 1950s rural life in Europe underwent profound changes, partly as a result of the Second World War, and partly as a result of changes which had been in progress over many years. This book examines a range of European countries, from Scandinavia to Spain and Ireland to Hungary, during this crucial period, and identifies the common pressures to which they all responded and the features that were unique to individual countries. In particular, it examines the processes of agricultural development over western Europe as a whole, the impact of the war on international trading patterns, the relationships between states and farmers, and the changing identities of rural populations. It presents a bold attempt to write rural history on a European scale, and will be of interest not only to historians and historical geographers, but also to those interested in the historical background to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union, to which the changes discussed here provided a dramatic prologue.

This book provides the analysis on capital markets in China, focusing attention upon (1) the bubble phenomena (whether or not a Chinese bubble really exists and might burst), (2) foreign direct investment and (3) integration, through all of which we could recognize the current situation and the future prospects of Chinese marketization. As regards to the bubble phenomena, particularly 'early warning indicator' of the bubble, this book attempts to utilize the Grubbs-Smirnov Test to discover the 'abnormal value' in several asset markets. Investigations of this book suggest that the distinctive features of the Chinese market have been significantly different from the markets of capitalist countries such as the United States and Japan. As far as Japan's foreign direct investments in China are concerned, this book tries to reveal the Chinese characteristics on FDI phenomena with FDI-trade ratio. The analysis of this book suggests that Chinese FDI from Japan has undoubtedly revealed the distortions caused by non-economic factors, which also mean that the distinctive features of the Chinese market have been different from the markets of the United States and Japan etc. Regarding integration, this book provides the analysis on the 'G2' system between the United States and China (cooperation or conflict between them). The considerations of this book conclude that it might be difficult to have good cooperation between them because of significant differences between the Chinese system and the US system.

Every banking crisis, whatever its particular circumstances, has two features in common with every previous one. Each has been preceded by a period of excessive monetary ease, and by ill thought out regulatory changes. For many the recent hiatus in inter-bank lending has been seen as a blip - enormous in size and global in scope, but, nonetheless, a blip. Finance at the Threshold offers a unique perspective from an English economic and monetary historian. In it the author asks: Why did the banks stop lending to one another, and why now? Was it merely a matter of over-loose credit due to the relaxation of traditional prudence, or did global finance find itself at its limits? Have government bail-outs saved the day or merely postponed the problem? Christopher Houghton Budd offers a radical view of the global financial crisis, spanning a wide gamut of current thinking. He argues that we need, above all, to overcome the left-right divide so much taken for granted today, and promote financial literacy to young people. His contribution to the Transformation and Innovation Series claims that global finance has brought us to the limits of what mechanistic economic explanations can capture. New ideas and above all new instruments are needed so that innovation can shift from its dexterous exploitation of inefficiencies and turn its attention instead to fresh initiative. Finance at the Threshold is essential reading for academics and practitioners concerned with financial and economic policy and needing to develop a sense of the history thus understanding the forward prospects for global finance.

The current value of global trade has reached a staggering annual figure of $6 trillion in merchandise crossing borders. Such prolific global trading has, at the same time, begun to raise fears of pandemics and concerns for global health. Yet, investment in public health infrastructure and disease control was never designed to cope with international trade of this volume and diversity. Indeed, most health systems lag far behind, especially in poor countries. This has created new vulnerabilities for global populations to the introduction and amplification of infection through trade. Public fears have been further heightened by frightening news reports of deadly diseases such as Mad Cow disease and E. Coli. Risky Trade: Infectious Disease in the Era of Global Trade provides a thorough examination of the actual risks posed by disease in the age of globalization. Drawing on the economics of international trade and epidemiology, the author explores the critical health issues arising from the enormous increase in global trade and travel. Issues covered include: c The scale of the problem with particular reference to the Sakai outbreak of E. Coli; c Risks from particular microbes - Enteric and viral infections; Highly infectious agents; Antimicrobial resistance; and, Stealth agents; c Global outbreaks as a result of human travel and trade; c Prevention, surveillance and control; c The future health of global trading. In addition to highlighting the problems, the book also addresses some of the potential benefits the same globalization can bring to epidemic control through surveillance, diagnostics, treatment and investigation. The empirical approach ties together existing descriptions and case studies of epidemics building a comprehensive framework for examining new events and considering historical experience with infectious outbreaks. The volume will be a valuable guide to students, academics, practitioners, and policy makers in the areas of international trade, health economics, epidemiology, international/public health and disease control.

The study of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia has a long tradition. What is most striking in these studies is just how difficult it is to generalise about this ethnic group in the region. Whether or not they have been able to identify as Chinese has to a certain extend depended on different processes of social and political engineering, which in turn make them more or less distinct as an ethnic group. In the case of Malaysia, national political schemes such as the affirmative action policy indirectly force the Malaysian ethnic Chinese to conceive of themselves as a coherent collective, and yet, when asked Chinese entrepreneurs in the maintain that despite the affirmative action policy ethnicity is not the a defining deciding factor when it comes to identifying business partners. This book focuses on the consequences of these kinds of policies in the field of inter-ethnic business practices and entrepreneurship in Malaysia within the wider context of the relationship between local, national and global markets. It focuses on the complexities of inter-ethnic relations and in particular, the strong economic position of the ethnic Chinese and their impact on the Malaysian economic scene as well as on the wider Southeast Asian region, underlining the degree to which inter-ethnic relations in Southeast Asia are crucial to understanding the political and economic complexitiescharacteristic of characterizing the region. In turn, it takes small and medium-sized enterprises as case studies, and shows how they are being shaped and in return shape the society in which they constitute a part. In doing so, the book highlights how these companies not only relate to the domestic economy, but also cater to the global economy, and presents a compelling argument for the introduction of a glocalised perspective in international business studies. Ethnic Chinese Entrepreneurship in Malaysia will be welcomed by students and scholars with an interest in Asian studies, political economy, international business studies, inter-ethnic relations and diaspora studies.

Efforts to use existing trade agreements to build a larger regional agreement face many challenges. This book considers this problem with reference to ASEAN's current agreements with key partners and the interest to build the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The analysis of the options is framed by a focus on the use of supply chains in international business. Issues considered include those related to reductions in tariffs, trade facilitation, the treatment of investment and of services and the definition of rules of origin. The work is informed by case studies of supply chains in automobile and electronics, and in a professional service sector. The book provides a set of priority actions for better progress in taking a bottom-up approach to building RCEP.

This ground-breaking book addresses the problem of price disparities across countries and, for the first time, uses market structures as the central focus. The author also addresses the effects of trade barriers, input-output relations and economies of scale, factors often ignored by other studies, to determine what causes prices to vary across countries.A post-Keynesian markup pricing model incorporating market power, intermediate inputs and productivity differences is developed and tested using regression analysis. New data on sectoral price levels in Japan and the Republic of Korea and data on GDP and investment price levels for a large number of countries are used. The empirical evidence shows that wages, labor productivity, market power and economies of scale are the most important variables for the explanation of differing price levels across countries. The author finds little evidence for the importance of policy-induced trade barriers and competition policy in explaining this. This book will be useful for scholars of post-Keynesian economics and international economics.

The mood of the international grain market changed remarkably in the decade before this book was originally published in 1986. In the early 1970s, which were years of buoyancy and high prices, the concern was with feeding the starving millions and subsequently, in the United states, with the use of the grain embargo weapon to put pressure on the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, after a long period in which the recession kept prices down, the climate was much gloomier. The book considers the state of the major supplier countries and their particular problems. It charts the changes in the market and discusses major issues of international concern. It concludes by surveying prospects for the market.

The author has virtually incomparable experience in both providing trade policy advice to more than 25 countries on behalf of the World Bank and also publishing quality journal articles in most of those cases. In this volume, he focuses on his work on: (i) trade policies for countries making the transition from planned to market economies; (ii) his trade policy guideline papers for the World Bank on trade policies for poverty alleviation, uniform tariff policy, adjustment costs of trade liberalization, exchange rate overvaluation, globalization and technology transfer and rules of thumb on regional trade policies; (iii) multilateral, dynamic and environmental issues in trade policy using computable general equilibrium models; (iv) trade policy of the United States in the auto and steel industries; and (v) mathematical methods for modeling. The papers show an unusual combination of policy relevance, advice and impact, with rigor and international trade theory insights.The papers in this volume have appeared in many of the economics profession's more prestigious journals, including Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic Journal, the Journal of International Economics, International Economic Review, European Economic Review, Canadian Journal of Economics, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Comparative Economic, Review of International Economics, World Economy, the Southern Economic Journal, the World Bank Economic Review, the Japanese Economic Review and the Latin American Journal of Economics. In this book, the author elaborates on the articles by discussing some of the policy contexts for the requests for the work from developing and transition countries to the World Bank, the key trade theory or policy insights, policy recommendations and conclusions and the policy impacts.

First published in 1982, the editors and authors of this book examine the United States' 1973 embargo on the export of soybeans and its effects on U.S.-Japanese relations. Although eventually shipment of soybeans to Japan resumed, the embargo temporarily soured the friendly relations of the two democracies. This book, prepared by a group of Japanese and U.S. scholars, demonstrates how trade relations between the two countries are affected by their internal political situations and by the nature of their respective agricultural industries. U.S.-Japanese Agricultural Trade Relations will be valuable to scholars, policy makers, and others interested in agricultural trade. It should be particularly useful in courses on international trade and on agricultural policy.

Nontariff Measures and International Trade includes 20 chapters authored by John Beghin and co-authors over the last 20 years on the economics of quality-standard like nontariff measures in the context of international trade. This book provides a coherent and comprehensive treatment of these nontariff measures, from their measurement to their effects on trade and welfare. In Part I, the authors use different perspectives to make the case that, unlike tariffs, quality-standard like nontariff measures are complex to measure and analyze and do not easily lead to general policy prescriptions. Then, Part II contains contributions on measurements of welfare and trade effects of nontariff measures, accounting for potential market imperfections. Part III presents chapters on the potential protectionism of nontariff measures when they are used to favor some economic agents over society. The last part presents cases studies of nontariff measures in different industries, markets, and countries.

Export Credit Agencies provide insurance and guarantees to domestic firms in the event that payment is not received from an importer. Thus, ECAs reduce uncertainties domestic firms face in exporting their goods. Most countries have ECAs that operate as official or quasi-official branches of their governments and they therefore represent an important part of government strategies to facilitate trade, promote domestic industry and distribute foreign aid. The Political Economy of Trade Finance provides a detailed analysis as to how firms use the medium and longer-term financing provided by ECAs to export goods to developing countries. It also explains how ECA arrears have contributed to the debt of developing countries and illustrates how the commercial interests of ECA activity are evident in decisions about IMF arrangements and related to Paris Club debt rescheduling agreements. Finally, the book documents how the medium and longer-term export credit insurance support provided by the G-7 ECAs was a central component in mitigating steep declines in international trade during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This book is of great interest to both academics and students in the field of political economy, finance and politics of international trade. It is also of importance to policy makers.

How do international negotiations affect domestic politics? Starting in the 1990s, countries throughout Latin America embarked on many and simultaneous negotiations. On the shifting ground of widening and deepening trade agendas and diverse arenas, what factors determined trade politics? This book examines the domestic political dynamics triggered by South-South, North-South and multilateral agendas in Argentina and Chile between 1990 and 2005. Using a much-needed cross-negotiation and cross-country comparative perspectives, and through detailed empirical analyses of several key negotiations, it proposes an explanation that emphasizes the interplay between international negotiations and domestic trade politics, taken as the result of the complex and dynamic interdependencies and interrelations between state and society. Informed by interviews with public officials, businesses and civil society, the analysis reveals that variation in the depth of agendas, the distributional effects and the uncertainty of political outcomes all have important consequences for domestic preference formation, collective action strategies and types of relationships. Given this, the variety of negotiations, when considered separately and comparatively, show that South-South, North-South and multilateral processes promote different patterns of trade politics. In sum, although national specificities and historical legacies are important, the book argues that trade policy comes first in creating domestic politics in Latin America.

Including specially commissioned articles and produced in association with JCMS, The Journal of Common Market Studies Annual Review, covers the key developments in the European Union, its member states, and acceding and/or applicant countries in 2020. Written by leading experts in their respective fields covering a wide array of political, economic and legal issues The Annual Review is the most up-to-date and authoritative source of information for practitioners, scholars, students and researchers of European integration as well as for general readers who simply want to know more about the European Union and have a pluralism of voices This year, a set of articles analyse various aspects of the Covid-19 crisis and of the EU responses to it: institutional, political economic and medical Includes a longer-term analysis and reflection on emergency politics in the EU, as well as a piece on how the Black Lives Matter movement developed in Europe Other contributions focus on the impact of the public health crisis on new policies, such as the recently launched European Green Deal The external dimension of the EU is covered by contributions analyzing the Belarusian crisis, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, and the EU's relationships with the US and with China

The core structure of the regulatory regime for international civil aviation (the 'Chicago System') is inter-national. The features of the Chicago System were designed in an era when the world's airlines were State-owned, and the most pressing international concerns were for navigation and safety regulation. Economic liberalization and intense globalization since the Second World War have impacted on the industry; today, it is global. This book observes the developing governance of global aviation, taking into account the concepts of sovereignty, jurisdiction and territoriality, and the proliferation of actors and participants as partners in a global public policy network, to posit that an upgraded system of global governance for civil aviation helps to explain the emerging complex landscape for global governance of civil aviation. As evidence of the emerging, complex matrix of governance of global aviation, this book identifies and reviews a selection of contemporary, transnational economic and environmental challenges facing the globalized aviation sector, e.g. fair competition safeguards, consumer protection, noise pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and the respective 'legal' and policy actions taken at national level (United Arab Emirates, Qatar and People's Republic of China), regional level (the European Union) and international level (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and International Civil Aviation Organization). The book concludes that economic and environmental regulation of international aviation, designed for an inter-national world of yesterday, evolves into global governance of aviation, which is more suited for today's global world. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and practitioners of aviation law, competition law and environmental law, as well as in the areas of transnational law, global governance and international relations.

An important read for academics and policy-makers alike, Hard Choices, Soft Law asserts that voluntary standards, or 'soft' law, are an important supplement to international law in a number of areas. This key work firstly outlines the approach taken to combining soft and hard law and trade, environment and labour values in the WTO and NAFTA, and in the prospective Millennium Round. Then, using the forestry sector - a realm where formal international law remains largely absent - the book provides a detailed examination of the role of soft law in action. It demonstrates how soft and hard law can be combined to promote trade, environmental and social cohesion, in ways that also permit sustainable development. The book presents a wealth of knowledge from a range of contributors familiar with the work of the G7/G8, the OECD, the Biodiversity Convention and the Codex Alimentarius.

This book provides the reader with a comprehensive analysis of US Federal Antitrust and EC Competition Law. It is encyclopaedic in coverage: examining every constituent element of the law and landmark decisions from the perspectives of economics and policy goals, explaining their implications for commercial operations and advocating policy reforms where necessary.