No abstract

The manner and extent of state discrimination against international business since the start of the Global Financial Crisis is documented and interpreted. Without resorting to 1930s-style across-the-board tariff increases, governments have tilted the playing field in favor of local firms so often since November 2008 that 70% of the world's goods exports competed against crisis-era trade distortions by 2013. Export mercantilism and other forms of selective subsidization are persistent features of crisis-era policy response. Available

Since the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, many governments have limited exports of medical supplies and medicines. Pre‐pandemic barriers to imports of medical supplies and soap remain largely in place. Having characterised trade policy stance towards COVID‐19‐related goods, this study critically assesses the resort to export curbs and import taxes. Elements of an alternative, positive trade policy contribution to surmount this pandemic are presented.

This paper examines the effects on national welfare and market access of two public procurement practices, discrimination and nontransparency. Both policies have become prominent in international trade negotiations, including the Doha Round of World Trade Organization (WTO) trade talks. We show that fostering either domestic competition or transparency in state contracting tends to improve welfare. In contrast, we find no clear-cut effect on market access of ending discrimination or improving transparency. This mismatch between market access and welfare effects may account for the slower progress in negotiating procurement disciplines in trade agreements than for traditional border measures such as tariffs.

The factors responsible for the spatial reorganization of contemporary manufacturing are presented here and the predictive power of long-standing notions of comparative advantage revisited. While a growing number of commercial tasks and technologies are in principle mobile internationally, giving rise to the perception of evermore footloose manufacturing firms and greater job insecurity, there is much in the modern organization of manufacturing that is both viscid and involves location-specific competitive advantages. This calls for a more nuanced assessment of the impact of an open world trading system on the spatial division of labor and on living standards. *The authors thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.