Institute for International Trade

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Letter to the Editors responding to Gould - Article in Journal issue no. 26
(Journal Public Health Policy, 2006) Stoler, Andrew Lynn; Institute for International Trade
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The view from the other side of the table: WTO accession from the perspective of members
(Cameron May, 2007) Lacey, S.; Streatfeild, J.; Lacey, S.
This paper was originally prepared for the Islamic Development Bank’s Seminar on WTO Accession Issues for selected Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) Member Countries, which took place on 28 -29 March 2006, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It offers a detour from the well-trodden ground of WTO accession procedures and the challenges acceding countries face throughout their accession negotiations, and instead focuses on the WTO accession process from the point of view of those on the other side of the table, namely WTO members. WTO accession as an issue has traditionally and indeed still continues to take a back seat to other fields of activity within the WTO, which tend to attract more attention from members as well as grabbing more headlines in the media.1 These more well-known issues include WTO dispute settlement, as well as the ongoing multilateral trade negotiations within the struggling Doha Round. It is perhaps for this reason that the topic of WTO accession tends to attract only a handful of members, who take a consistent and systemic interest in the topic.2 This paper is divided into two sections. Section One discusses the of acceding countries and makes an intellectual distinction between: 1) market access issues; 2) systemic issues, and; 3) non trade-related issues. Section Two of the present paper looks at some of the issues, which come up, in particular, under two different sectors, namely trade in agriculture and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. What is interesting is that each Member seems to have its own ‘pet’ issues on which it will invariably take a firm and committed stance. Also interesting is the fact that when two neighbouring countries are negotiating with one another, one as a Member and the other as an applicant, the Member can sometimes be relied upon to make a whole series of bilateral trade issues part of the multilateral accession process, thereby capitalising on its brief negotiating leverage. Finally, there seems to be a consensus that once bilateral deals have been completed with the few major players, accession negotiations tend to become a matter of dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, although, again, this strategy can also come unravelled in the face of a recalcitrant Member who has chosen to take a tough and committed stance on a particular issue.
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New Reflections on International Trade: Essays on Agriculture, WTO Accession and Systemic Issues
(Cameron May, 2007) Streatfeild, J.; Lacey, S.
Open Access
Multilateral Disciplines on Preferential Rules of Origin: How Far are We from Squaring the Circle?
(Wolters Kluwer, 2012) Lacey, S.
A significant quantity of global merchandise trade takes place under one of two sets of preferential rules of origin (ROO), either those of the European Union, the so-called Pan-European Cumulation System (PECS), or those generally preferred by the United States, as manifested in free trade agreements (FTAs) such as NAFTA and the many subsequent FTAs the US has concluded with various trading partners since then. Many years of work conducted by the World Customs Organization and the World Trade Organization have finally culminated in a draft text on non-preferential ROO, with the only thing standing in the way of its adoption being a relatively limited subset of narrowly defined political economy interests in some of the largest trading nations. Some observers have argued that the so-called spaghetti bowl of preferential trade agreements can be 'multilateralized', and that one way to achieve this would be to harmonize preferential ROO at the multilateral level, that is, at the WTO. A significant quantity of global merchandise trade takes place under one of two sets of preferential rules of origin (ROO), either those of the European Union, the so-called Pan-European Cumulation System (PECS), or those generally preferred by the United States, as manifested in free trade agreements (FTAs) such as NAFTA and the many subsequent FTAs the US has concluded with various trading partners since then. Many years of work conducted by the World Customs Organization and the World Trade Organization have finally culminated in a draft text on non-preferential ROO, with the only thing standing in the way of its adoption being a relatively limited subset of narrowly defined political economy interests in some of the largest trading nations. Some observers have argued that the so-called spaghetti bowl of preferential trade agreements can be 'multilateralized', and that one way to achieve this would be to harmonize preferential ROO at the multilateral level, that is, at the WTO. This paper looks at how easy or difficult it would be to achieve such harmonization, both in purely technical terms as well as a political economy matter. It concludes that the current system of ROO is quickly being overtaken by the realities of increasingly unbundled and globally dispersed production processes and that these rules are even more likely to need a complete rethink as global manufacturing in so many industries undergoes what is probably the most profound economic shakeup in over a hundred years.
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Economic growth and foreign workers in ASEAN and Singapore
(MIT Press, 2012) Thangavelu, S.
Abstract not available
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Natural disasters and Asia: introduction
(Blackwell Publishing, 2012) Abe, S.; Thangavelu, S.M.
Natural disasters inflict tremendous social, economic and human costs. They have the potential to affect the economic development not only of a domestic economy, but also the rest of the world, given the extent of interconnected production networks in this globalized era. The main objective of this special issue is to highlight the real issues of natural disaster management. This special issue focuses on key policy issues and case studies of recent events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE). We believe the lessons learned from past natural disasters should help to alleviate both the direct and indirect impacts of future disasters.
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FDI, financial constraints and productivity: firm-level study in Vietnam
(Routledge, 2013) Thangavelu, S.; Findlay, C.; Chongvilaivan, A.; Thangavelu, S.; Chongvilaivan, A.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been the key engine of growth for developing countries for the past decades. Developing countries have increasingly relied on FDI as a key engine of output, employment and productivity growth. The underlying rationale for attracting FDI in host countries rests with productivity spillovers associated with FDI, whereby positive externalities generated by multinational activities allow indigenous firms to pick up their productivity. Based on the transaction costs theory of FDI (Caves, 1996), multinational enterprises (MNEs) exploit superior knowledge (e.g. technological and informational advantage, managerial expertise and superior organizational structure) transferred from their foreign parents to compensate for the higher operating costs incurred in the host markets. MNEs are therefore expected to demonstrate higher performance in terms of profitability and productivity than domestically owned firms.
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Life after Doha: reflections in the run up MC9
(Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, 2013) Lacey, S.; Fukunaga, Y.; Riady, J.; Sauvé, P.
The Doha Round continues to struggle on with its ultimate fate still largely uncertain. This paper, written as part of a broader initiative by the World Trade Institute (WTI), the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) and Universitas Pelita Haparan (UPH) in the run up to the ninth WTO Ministerial Conference on Bali in December 2013, discusses how the multilateral trading system got to the current impasse and offers some preliminary thoughts on decoupling the fate of the WTO from that of what is now a largely moribund round of multilateral trade negotiations. This paper argues that the WTO is still the best organization the world has for tackling a number of increasingly pressing issues, and that despite the quagmire that the Doha Round has become, there still remains a number of important roles for the WTO to assume and to continue playing, not least of which being the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes compliance with international trade rules.
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Trade facilitation in ASEAN and ASEAN+1 FTAS: An analysis of provisions and progress
(Kluwer Law International, 2013) Pellan, Marie Isabelle; Wong, Marn-Heong; Institute for International Trade
Regional trade agreements concluded in recent years have increasingly included provisions on trade facilitation. Although ASEAN 1 FTAs vary in their scope, specificity and depth of commitments on trade facilitation, they tend to cover several core areas and affirm the application of international agreements, standards and instruments. A review of trade facilitation performance through a constructed Core Trade Facilitation Index shows that there are great disparities among ASEAN countries and their FTA partners. In considering the treatment of trade facilitation in a regional comprehensive economic partnership between ASEAN and its dialogue partners, attention could be given to defining a consistent set of trade facilitation principles, adopting specific measures, monitoring performance, implementing capacity-building measures and keeping abreast of developments in multilateral negotiations on trade facilitation.
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Australia
(Wolters Kluwer, 2013) Lacey, S.; Bienen, D.; Brink, G.; Ciuriak, D.
This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of both the history and current practice of antidumping in Australia. It explains how the Australian antidumping authorities interpret and apply both the substantive and procedurual requirements of an antidumping investigation under Australian implementing legislation of the WTO Agreement on Anti-dumping.
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Globalization, outsourcing and labour development in ASEAN
(Routledge, 2013) Thangavelu, S.; Chongvilaivan, A.
The empirical evidence this book reveals provides interesting insights into and implications on labour and industry development.
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A Handbook on Negotiating Preferential Trade Agreements: Services Liberalization
(United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 2013) Lacey, S.; Sauvé, P.
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Absorptive capacity and exporting and importing decisions: An application for developing economies
(Routledge, 2013) Márquez-Ramos, L.; Mártinez-Zarzoso, I.; Johannsen, F.; Karlsson, C.; Johansson, B.; Stough, R.
This chapter is intended to provide empirie al evidenee on the relationship between teehnologieal innovation and international trade using firm-level panel data in Egypt to study the dynamies of the relationship between partieipation in international trade markets and absorptive capacity. in order to do so, we take the teehnologieal innovation proeess as absorptive capacity and eonsider two faeets of teehnologieal innovation: Ereation and absorption. Our results show that both ereative and absorptive capacity has an important effeet on the deeision to trade in developing countries.
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Foreign talent and their impact on the Singapore economy: Impact of foreign workers on economic growth of Singapore economy
(World Scientific Publishing Company, 2014) Thangavelu, S.; bin Yahya, F.
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Services productivity and trade liberalization: case of ASEAN
(2014) Thangavelu, S.; Lili Yang,; Urata, Shujiro,; The 14th International Convention of the East Asian Economic Association (EAEA) (1 Nov 2014 - 2 Nov 2014 : Bangkok, Thailand)
Several studies have highlighted the importance of services sector development and in particular share of services to GDP has positive relationship to employment as per capita income increases. Services not only represent the biggest share in national GDP of OECD countries but are also the major source of overall productivity growth. In this paper we study the liberalization of the services sector and also productive contribution of services sector to productivity growth for the ASEAN countries. The paper extends the FDI Restrictiveness Index created for ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) in Thangavelu and Lim (2011) to the services sector in ASEAN. The results indicate that liberalization of the services sector creates significant linkages within the domestic economy and also in supporting the manufacturing sector in the regional and global production supply-chain. Thus the liberalization of the services sector will have significant impact on the regional supply-chain for ASEAN. We also observed productivity improvements of the services sector from trade (exports) activities of ASEAN. This paper is an extension of the FDI restrictiveness.
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Human capital, FTAs and foreign direct investment flows into ASEAN
(Elsevier, 2014) Thangavelu, S.; Narjoko, D.
Abstract not available.
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Productivity and learning-by-exporting: a firm-level analysis of Indian manufacturing
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) Pattnayak, S.; Thangavelu, S.
AbstractIn this paper, we examine whether firms become productive by learning through exporting. To this end, we estimate the production function using microdata of Indian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1991–2001. In contrast to studies on developed countries, our results provide evidence that Indian manufacturing firms are experiencing a rise in productivity through entering export markets and thus experience the learning effect. We also find that there is a productivity rise prior to exporting. Therefore, our results also support the self‐selection mechanism for exporting.
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Aid for Trade in Lowering Trade Costs: Overcoming Infrastructure and Institutional Constraints. Indonesia
(University Pelita Harapan. Center for International Trade and Investment (CITI), 2015) Lacey, S.; Limenta, M.; Chandra, S.
This study takes a hard and somewhat sobering look at the state of Indonesia’s physical (hard) and institutional (soft) infrastructure as the country moves into its second year under the presidential leadership of the recently elected Joko Widodo. The study’s focus is predominantly on how well (or poorly) the country is currently positioned to benefit from the positive and welfare enhancing effects of trade and investment liberalization, something that the country implicitly agreed to embrace when ‐ together with over 120 other economies ‐ it became a founding member of the World Trade Organization in 1995. We first examine some critical infrastructure bottlenecks as they affect roads, electricity generation and ports and conclude that, although the country has made some progress in addressing these, there is still much that needs to be done. The next section of the report focuses on the institutional constraints holding back Indonesia’s integration into the world trading system, particularly the glaring shortcomings that affect the judiciary and law enforcement, as well as the legislative and executive branches of government. Our report then turns to an analysis of the prevailing import and export regimes and finds that these are becoming more rather than less restrictive as various actors at different levels of government seek to establish and assert their permit‐issuing powers in a barely concealed effort to generate rents as well as induce shortages that connected parties can benefit from commercially. Finally our report turns to a brief discussion of the need to implement genuine and effective reform, arguing that this is what the Indonesian people voted for when they elected President Widodo, and discusses how the new president has fared in the face of entrenched elites and well‐organized opposing interests. We conclude that policymakers in Indonesia need to take another long hard look at how they ultimately perceive the national economic interest and how trade and investment liberalization frameworks like the WTO, ASEAN and the still ongoing RCEP negotiations can be harnessed to realize the ambitions of the new president and the electorate who voted for him.
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FDI liberalisation, free trade agreements and greater regionalism in Asia and ASEAN
(Routledge, 2015) Thangavelu, S.; Findlay, C.; Lim, H.; Findlay, C.
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The electronics industry in Malaysia
(Routledge, 2015) Parinduri, R.; Thangavelu, S.; Findlay, C.

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