Beyond Dutch disease

How does the deterioration of rule of law in Russia in recent years affect its ability to move away from an export pattern dominated by natural resources? We investigate this question using three datasets for Russia's bilateral trade relations for goods, services and investment at disaggregated level with its partner countries over the world. Our empirical analysis shows that the deterioration of the rule of law in Russia since 2003 has affected the long‐run trade performance of Russia in sophisticated and technology‐intensive manufactured goods, as well as its inward investments with advanced economies. It is precisely this type of trade that Russia should nurture to diversify away from hydrocarbons export dependence. Our statistical analysis also shows that Russia remains to a large extent an outlier within the multilateral trading system. It exports disproportionately less to partner countries which are or had become members of the WTO over our period of analysis. Russia's trade appears to have been negatively affected by the accession of these countries to the WTO. Russia itself finally acceded to the WTO in July 2012 amidst signs of a modest improvement of its rule‐of‐law indicators.     

基于就业导向的国际贸易专业英语课堂教学模式探讨

随着改革开放的深入和中国加入WTO,社会越来需要要既具备国贸专业知识,又能运用流利的英语与外界交往的高素质人才。在当前就业形势日趋严峻的情况下,提高国际贸易专业毕业生的专业英语素质,不但能提高其就业竞争力,而且能为我国经济与社会发展提供强有力的人才支持和智力保证。要应对挑战,当前国际贸易专业英语教育改革就应当与市场需求接轨、以就业为导向,并在此基础上提出国际贸易专业英语课堂教学模式的构想。     

Small farmer cooperatives and voluntary coffee certifications: Rewarding progressive farmers of engendering widespread change in Costa Rica?

Our research examines the benefits and drawbacks for cooperatives who participate in voluntary coffee certifications. We interviewed administrators at twenty Costa Rican coffee cooperatives about management practices related to voluntary certification. Voluntary certifications are popular among coffee cooperatives. Access to certified markets is facilitated by state support of the cooperative sector, regulation of the coffee sector and well-enforced environmental and social laws. However, there are no significant or consistent financial incentives for farmers to pursue certification. Multiple certifications may lower auditing and implementation costs, but cooperatives rarely receive the full premium for multiply-certified coffee. Low market demand for certified coffee, weak price incentives and high auditing and management costs encourage cooperatives to certify only a portion of their members. This strategy rewards compliant farmers rather than inducing widespread change to farming practices among the entire membership. Though financial incentives are weak, certifications offer non-financial benefits to both farmers and cooperatives, including better management and more resilient cooperatives.     

Factors of trade in Europe

We analyze how a set of determinants affect trade among European countries over the period 1992–2008. The factors encompass variables from the areas of geography, culture, institutions, infrastructure, and trade direction. Trade is analyzed for four types of goods: primary goods, parts and components, capital goods, and consumer goods. For each type of good we also distinguish its definition in terms of flows, intensive margin, and extensive margin. Methodologically, we first derive country-pair fixed effects over all possible pairs of export–import partners, and in the second stage we relate fixed effects with a set of influential factors. We show (i) the intuitive and varying effects of geographical, cultural, and institutional factors; (ii) the beneficial effects of soft and hard infrastructure; and (iii) the key importance of trade between old and new EU members.     

知识产权壁垒研究综述

在国际贸易往来中,知识产权作为贸易保护主义的一种工具被发达国家越来越频繁地使用,形成了一种新型的贸易壁垒即知识产权壁垒,随着贸易摩擦的频率与次数逐渐增多,其对贸易国家尤其是发展中国家构成了较大的威胁与障碍。立足于我国实际,通过结合国内外学者最新研究成果对知识产权壁垒研究进行梳理与总结并得出启示,提出我国相关产业与企业应客观看待并积极应对知识产权壁垒,不断提高自主创新能力与国际竞争力。     

The impact of FTAs on MENA trade in agricultural and industrial products

This article analyses the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) trade for the period 1994–2010. The analysis distinguishes between industrial and agricultural trade to take into account the different liberalization schedules. An augmented gravity model is estimated using up-to-date panel data techniques to control for all time-invariant bilateral factors that influence bilateral trade as well as for the so-called multilateral resistance factors. We also control for the endogeneity of the agreements and test for self-selection bias due to the presence of zero trade in our sample. The main findings indicate that North–South-FTAs and South–South-FTAs have a differential impact in terms of increasing trade in MENA countries, with the former being more beneficial in terms of exports for MENA countries, but both showing greater global market integration. We also find that FTAs that include agricultural products, in which MENA countries have a clear comparative advantage, have more favourable effects for these countries than those only including industrial products.     

对当前背景下国企工会职能的转变及服务创新的研究

在当前的社会背景下,工会在国企的发展过程中发挥着重要的作用,它在维护员工利益以及推动企业与员工的沟通与联系等方面作出了突出的贡献。随着国有企业的不断改革与创新,时代环境对工会的工作也提出了更高的要求,工会需要进行职能转变以及服务创新。     

International free riding on institutions

Economic institutions are linked to economic growth because they create conditions favourable for production and exchange. Institutions can give a country comparative advantage in producing some goods. If its trading partners lack such institutions, it can still enjoy their benefits by importing these goods. Some institutions, such as intellectual property rights, have non‐excludable benefits because the resulting production is intangible, non‐rival, and often publicly disclosed. The profits, or surplus, that result, however, is rival. Foreign countries can ‘free ride’ on this benefit by misappropriating rival surplus through infringement. This article develops a theory of institutional free riding in which firms in one country free ride on the benefit of foreign institutions to the detriment of their competitor firms and their countries' institutions. It evaluates the incentives of firms and governments for this free riding, its effects, and potential responses to mitigate these effects.     

The effects of regional trade integration and renewable energy transition on environmental quality: Evidence from South Asian neighbors

Improving environmental quality across South Asia has become one of the utmost important policy agendas of the concerned governments. The susceptibility of the majority of the South Asian countries to multifaceted climate change adversities has motivated the need to identify the factors that can function to ensure environmental sustainability across South Asia. Although several studies have highlighted the importance of globalization and cleaner energy use in tackling the environmental degradaton issues of the South Asian countries, very little is known regarding the impacts of regional trade and renewable energy transition in this regard. Hence, this paper aims to scrutinize the effects of enhancing intra-regional trade integration and undergoing renewable energy transition on per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the context of six South Asian nations between 1990 and 2016. The results from the recently developed cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag regression approach, accounting for cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, reveal that facilitating trade among the South Asian neighbors reduces carbon emissions in both the short and long run. Moreover, enhancing the share of renewable energy in the aggregate energy consumption figures is also found to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in both the short and long run. Furthermore, both regional trade integration and renewable energy transition are found to jointly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia. The results also authenticate the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, while financial development and urbanization are found to boost carbon dioxide emissions only in the long run.     

亚太区域贸易协定的经济增长效应*——基于RTAs数量与质量的对比研究

21世纪以来，亚太地区区域贸易协定（RTA）签署的数量激增，学术界理论与现实出现悖论，引发学者思考各国热衷于建立RTAs背后的原因并探索新的研究方法。本文首次从RTAs数量和质量的影响效应哪个更为重要的视角，将发达国家和发展中国家进行对比分析，深入探究发达国家在新时期推进新一代贸易协定规则的原因。通过比对RTA协议的每一条条款，测算出涉及传统WTO+和新一代WTO-X领域的条款覆盖率和法定承诺率指标来衡量RTA的质量，实证分析得出，签署高质量的区域贸易协定能更有效地推动亚太地区的经济增长和人民福利水平的提高，该影响效应在发达国家中更为明显，而发展中国家受限于执行能力在新一代规则下签订RTA对经济增长的作用不显著。