External Trade Relations Research Articles

Comércio Externo Do Brasil E Suas Macrorregiões: Um Teste Do Teorema De Heckscher-Ohlin (Foreign Trade of Brazil and Its Macro-Regions: A Test of the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem)

The goal of this paper was to evaluate if the external trade relations that take place in the Brazilian economy as a whole and if each one of its five macro regions are in accordance of their relative abundance of factors of production, or if there is other reasons that explain the production location.In the tests, conducted using the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem for the external trade of Brazil and its macro regions, with their principal partners in the international market, it was possible to verify that the theorem was valid for all the 30 relations of trade observed. Brazil and its macro regions have shown relative abundance of non-qualified labor in the trade with the more developed countries and relative abundance of qualified labor in the trade with less developed countries. The results for the intra-industry trade confirms the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem in 27 cases, the exceptions are found in the trade between: a) Brazil and Mercosur; b) Southeast region and Mercosur; and c) South region and Mercosur.

The Role of Atypical Acts in EU External Trade and Intellectual Property Policy

This article discusses atypical acts of the European Union (EU) concerning intellectual property (IP) protection within the EU's internal legal order and its external relations. Internally, atypical acts are used in IP for flexible pre- and post-regulation purposes or for soft guidance and steering. Yet in IP and elsewhere, those flexibilities come at the cost of deficits in democratic legitimacy, legality, and legal certainty. Atypical acts are also common in the external trade relations of the EU. Like more formal conduct of trade relations by means of international agreements, they focus on the enforcement of IP rights. The less formal (and legal) character of these acts often allows them to be more policy-driven and so makes it easier to address key political concerns relevant for EU external trade relations in a more flexible and current manner. Some of these policies are subsequently turned into �hard� law � for example in the course of the negotiations over the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Based on the comparative analysis of the role of atypical acts in the EU's internal legislation for IP vis-a-vis their role in external action, this article explores possibilities of limiting the drawbacks while preserving the benefits of a use of atypical acts in external policies.

EU State Aid Policy and External Trade Relations

European Union (EU) state aid policy has an oft-overlooked external dimension that is most clearly witnessed in the linkage with external trade relations. This paper seeks to illuminate the issues and potential problems raised by this state aid-trade linkage. If EU state aid creates barriers to market access, it can contravene international trading rules, in particular those of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement. When this linkage is made to external trade, the EU engages offensively in an array of complex international interactions through which it may pursue two politically-contentious procedures: countervailing duties or dispute settlement. The paper argues that an understanding of the EU’s role in these complex interactions must take into account the Union’s institutional landscape and the competing preferences of different private interests. When deciding to impose countervailing duties against foreign state aids (ie, subsidies), private interests play a significant role in initiating investigations and can use their access to both the Commission and member states to encourage the imposition of such measures. While a variety of factors help to explain why EU institutions and firms prefer pursuing countervailing duties — including increased speed, greater likelihood of satisfying domestic interests, remedy against past subsidies, and the time lag before filing a counter-complaint — the Union also actively uses the WTO’s formal dispute settlement mechanism (DSM) as an alternative in the complex interactions. Under this alternative, private interests again play an important role, pursuing varying strategies of passive non-opposition, active opposition and active support. The most important determinant of a firm’s preference to pursue countervailing duties or a DSM dispute appears to be the extent to which it is concerned with restoring competition in their home market or with restoring competition in multiple/global markets.

Global “openness” and trade regionalism of the New Partnership for Africa's Development

Post-independent Africa is riddled with failed skeletons of development initiatives. Trade regionalism offered the potential for Africa's economic renewal on the presumption that it would consolidate intra-African trade and extra-continental exportation. Under the new trade regionalism, Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs) increasingly faced paradoxical trade development philosophies with extremes of outward orientation and inward orientation. Whereas Africa's RECs were, by design, inward-oriented with formal obligatory treaties, the ascendancy of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) entailed outward orientation, and global openness practices. NEPAD established direct contacts with member states to enforce unilateral action outside existing RECs' treaties to deepen national structural adjustments at the RECs scale, through the Most Favored Nation principle. This study argues that NEPAD failed to enhance intra-African trade or extra-continental exportation. Standard and global principal component analysis were applied to the 2000 and 2006 trade regimes of five RECs, recognized by the African Union as building blocs for the African Economic Community. Summary statistics have demonstrated that NEPAD improved neither intra-African trade nor extra-continental exportation. It concludes that NEPAD trade regionalism perpetuated the importation-biased colonial production structure and vertical external trade relations.

Bargaining Power and Trade Liberalization: European External Trade Policies in the 1960s

Shortly after the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC, 1958), European countries accepted a far-reaching liberalization of their previously fairly protectionist external trade relations. I provide an explanation of this astonishing development that builds on the argument that the establishment of a customs union increases the bargaining power of its member countries in international trade negotiations. When facing discrimination from a customs union, exporters in excluded countries have an incentive to become politically active and lobby their governments for relief. This increase in exporter lobbying, in turn, weakens the negotiating position of excluded countries in international trade negotiations by making them more eager to achieve a negotiated agreement that lowers the external barriers of the customs union. The evidence presented backs this argument by showing that the EEC member countries accepted external trade liberalization in the 1960s because they could gain disproportionate concessions for European exporting interests in international trade negotiations.

Energy supply security and geopolitics: A European perspective

The security of energy supply to the EU is examined in the context of two storylines. Markets and Institutions exemplifies an economically and politically integrated, multilateral world with effective institutions and markets. Regions and Empires involves a world broken up in rival political and economic blocks, competing for resources and markets via political, economic and military power. It is shown that these storylines have a significant impact on the development of the energy market, on the way in which energy supply may be secured and on the effect and applicability of the several types of instruments available. The current EU is geared towards enlargement and a deepening of economic integration, based on the tenets of the post-1945 multilateral world system. The present world tends towards Regions and Empires and suggests that the EU may have to reorient its energy security policy. Energy policy must become an integral part of EU external trade and foreign relations and security policy. The EU should develop its own strategy, actively investing in dialogues with producer countries in the Persian Gulf and Africa and with Russia. Sustainable prosperity and governance in these regions will support EU energy security.

Peaceful warriors and warring peacemakers

Discourse and policy on war economies has tended to treat them as separate and distinct from both the pre- and post-conflict economy. In reality, war economies tend to represent simply more violent versions of the neo-patrimonialism and external trade relations that characterize many developing states both before and after conflict. Assuming that peace will inevitably resolve the legacies that war economies leave behind is thus a forlorn hope. In addition, the discourse and control agenda surrounding conflict trade has been constructed in a way that negatively affects peacebuilding. In particular, the focus on certain pariahs or specific conflict goods tends to understate the complexity of war economies and the social function they serve - features that persist into peace.

Common Commercial Policy: The Expanding Competence of the European Union in the Area of International Trade

The European Union (EU) acts in the area of international trade through the community's commercial policy regulated by the European Community (EC) Treaty. The position of the Union in external trade relations is dependant on the unique legal character of this entity. By developing a legal order which is supreme to the law of its Member States, and creating a complex system of institutions and modes of decision-making, the Community has ceased to be a mere representative of the countries it comprises. The increasing transfer of competences from the Member States onto the community allowed it to aim at the realization of common objectives as opposed to merely collective ones. As a result, tensions between the EC and dissatisfied Member States occur and the delineation of competences may turn out to be crucial when interests of an individual Member State are involved. Therefore, the paper which considers the situation of the “new” European Union in the area of international trade, in light of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (Constitutional Treaty), should necessarily investigate how the position of the EU will be strengthened vis-à-vis its Member States.

The European Court of Justice and the EC External Trade Relations: A Legal Analysis of the Court's Problems with Regard to International Agreements

AbstractThis article explains why the WTOand the various agreements that form an integral part of the Agreement establishing the WTO raise problems and challenges for the Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ). It focuses on the role of the ECJ in relation to exclusive and shared competence. The European Community's (EC) specific problems and challenges for the ECJ are partly related to the EC's position in the WTO. In this sense, the opinion of Advocate General Tesauro in Hermès International v. FHT Marketing Choice is helpful for understanding the unitary character of the EC's external trade relations. This article includes a discussion of Hermès v. FHT Marketing concerning the interpretation of Article 50 of the Agreement on TRIPS, annexed to the 1994 Agreement establishing the WTO. The new mechanisms introduced by the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding are perhaps not comparable to the full judicial system within the EU, but they have changed both the rules and the legal culture concerning the adjudication and enforcement obligations. Although the WTO is still an intergovernmental organization, powerful private actors have already learned to manipulate the system to reach legal adjudication under the guise of intergovernmental disputes. This paper concludes that the EC wants to deny 'direct effect' to the WTO. This article offers the conclusion that we must aim at the creation of new standards to judge the applicability of international agreements. Otherwise, by allowing policy makers to decide rather than ECJ, the EC legal order may be at risk.

Doi Moi Policy and the Small-Enterprise Boom in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

For more than a decade after North and South Vietnam were reunified in 1975, the ruling Communist Party attempted to implement throughout the country the socialist precepts of Marxism-Leninism that had been applied in the North since the defeat of the French colonial forces in 1954. But in mid-1985, in a sudden and surprising policy reversal, the Communist Party's Central Committee proposed an economic blueprint called Doi Moi (literally, Renovation), which aimed to reform the economy completely and to lead Vietnam rapidly toward market capitalism. The main goals of Doi Moi were to improve lagging productivity, to raise living standards, and to curb rapid inflation, which reached almost 500 percent a year in the mid-1980s (Kimura 1993, 51). The strategy would reestablish a multisector economy driven by private enterprise under government supervision. It sought to increase foreign investment, curtailed during the United Nations embargo that followed the Vietnamese invasion of neighboring Cambodia in 1978-1979. The government hoped its reforms would end isolationism by expanding external trade and commercial relations. This bold reversal of strategy, almost unprecedented among Marxist nations at the time, was ratified by the Sixth Party Congress in 1986, making Vietnam one of the first Soviet Bloc nations to formally take the capitalist road. Shortly after the Doi Moi policy was announced, economic indicators revealed a spurt of growth in the Vietnamese economy (Table I). Most economists, historians, and political scientists who have analyzed the postreform period in Vietnam, as Adam Fforde and Stefan de Vylder (1996, 246) cogently point out, have taken a topdown approach, crediting Doi Moi with having created the growth spurt. Studies that hypothesize a catalytic role for the Vietnamese Communist Party in generating economic change are usually based on interpretations of official national statistics and the pronouncements of major political figures (Vo 1990; Than and Tan 1993; Vu 1994; Do 1995), rather than on a dose geographical, historical, and sectoral study of the economy itself. Some analysts (Perkins 1993, 9; Sachs and Woo 1994, 274) characterize [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE I OMITTED] Doi Moi as a big-bang economic liberalization that almost overnight transformed a stagnant peasant economy into a vibrant, market-driven, capitalist system. These studies give the impression that the dramatic commercial expansion and diversification in Vietnam in the late 1980s were the consequences of a central-government fiat. Closer scrutiny of relationships and events in the regional economies of Vietnam, both before and after Doi Moi, casts doubt on the big-bang thesis. The dramatic commercial expansion initially bypassed the industrial and political heartland around Hanoi, focusing instead on Ho Chi Minh City and its immediate hinterland, where the petty-enterprise sector experienced almost unprecedented boom conditions (Vokes 1995, 312). This apparent, sudden swelling of the ranks of petty entrepreneurs, whose output is rarely measured in official statistics, gave the impression that this sector had also been created de novo by the Doi Moi policy. Dwight Perkins, for example, pictures the small-enterprise sector as dependent on Hanoi's market reform (1993, 11). But this leaves unanswered the question of why the expansion did not initially diffuse from Hanoi. Although the informal sector in Vietnam has received little explicit attention from those who adopt either a bottom-up or a top-down approach to the transformation, the prevailing policy-centered attitude toward it is perhaps most dearly expressed by Richard Stubbs (1989, 51): [A]fter the Sixth Party Congress . . . the emphasis has been on renovating the mechanisms of economic management. . . . There have also been major efforts to provide new incentives and marketing opportunities which have produced a boom in local markets and the emergence of 'street front capitalism' in urban areas. …

Russia and the world economy: problems of integration

List of Tables Preface 1. From the Soviet Union to Russia 2. Russian and Soviet economic development and foreign trade 3. The organisation of foreign economic relations 4. The Soviet economic system and the demand for imports 5. Soviet hard currency earnings 6. Soviet economic reforms and reform debates under Gorbachev 7. The reform of foreign economic relations under Gorbachev 8. Problems in exporting under Gorbachev 9. Soviet balance of payments pressures 1985-91 and their impact on the economy 10. The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia 11. Russian external trade and economic relations 12. Russia and the world economy: problems of integration and the role of the West. Bibliography Index

China's ‘open door’

What was expected of socialist Third World countries used to be fairly clear, at least as far as their external economic relations were concerned. Since self-reliance implied a high degree of internal provisioning they were not expected to engage to any extent in foreign trade. Acceptance of loans, let alone capital investment, from abroad would create grave suspicions as to the integrity of the country's socialist leadership. To find such a country setting up export processing zones, sending labour and technicians abroad, inviting its expatriate capitalists to invest in the motherland, and joining the World Bank and IMF would be seen as indicating a fundamental change of direction! Not surprising, then, to find that China's changing policies in external trade and foreign economic relations have been sending shock-waves throughout the world. But it should also be apparent that such expectations of what a socialist developing country should do were to a large extent created precisely by foreigners' perceptions of the Chinese example. This is especially true of the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) during which self-reliance sometimes seemed to mean autarky (isolationism and self-sufficiency). But more generally, that upheaval focused a great deal of attention on the benefits for China of 'relying mainly on its own efforts'.' This combined neatly with the most common explanations as to why Third World countries are underdeveloped-that they suffered as colonies and remained subject to dependency after independence. If proponents of 'real development' from the South and their radical supporters in the West could see in China an alternative to dependency (and often capitalism per se into the bargain), then it ought to be expected that the post-Mao changes stimulate some deep rethinking of

A Structural Study of India's Trade Dependence (1956-75)

The period beginning with 1951 happens to be a crucial one in India's economic history. It marks the beginning of the era of planning. A popularly elected government went in for massive development effort allocating public resources and directing private resources in accordance with pre-determined social priorities. This process has continued for nearly thirty years. It is important to know the impact of the pattern of economic growth during this period on the external trade relations. This is the main focus of this study.

Japan and the European community: An uneasy partnership

Bewildering advances of Japanese production into many fields of European industry are a cause of grave concern in the EC. Calls for protection are growing louder as a mixture of fear and impatience spreads throughout the Community. Wilhelm Haferkamp, EC Commissioner in charge of external trade relations, explains why trade war practices are no solution to the problem.

Israel's External Trade Relations

Israel's External Trade Relations

Israel's External Trade Relations

Israel's External Trade Relations

La grande sécheresse de 1973 à Chypre

Cyprus suffred in 1972-73 the worst drought ever registered since the beginning of meteorological observations in the island. This drought did not affect the island's economy and its population's standards of living as did the previous ones which are known through history : Cyprus enjoys nonadays better equipments and has easy external trade relations. With a special reference to the irrigated area of Morfou it is stressed that the local aquifers may be destroyed by over extraction because the boom of oranges' and grapefruits' cultivation was quicker than the implementation of a comprehensive plan prepared to enlarge the water shed and increase the aquifers' inputs : such a discrepancy may destroy the ecological balance.

Zambia's Changing Pattern of External Trade

Abstract This article deals with the changing patterns of external trade relations of the Republic of Zambia since the country became independent in 1964. Special attention is given to trade relations with countries in southern Africa, such as Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese territories of Mocambique and Angola.