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New horizons are opening for Africa, with a growing number of Chinese andIndian businesses fostering its integration into advanced markets. However,significant imbalances will have to be addressed on both sides of the equation to support long-term growth.

As the world marketplace becomes ever more globalized, much is at stake for the prosperity of hundreds of millions of people in Europe and Central Asia as the region’s transition process continues through its second decade. Understanding the underlying dynamics shaping the contours and most salient impacts of international integration that have emerged—and likely to emerge prospectively—in the region is thus a crucial challenge for the medium term economic development agenda, not only for policymakers in the countries on themselves, but also for their trading partners, the international financial institutions, the donor community and the future of the world trading system as a whole. This book addresses this challenge.

This paper examines the economic implications of fiscal policy coordination in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) in the light of the January 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc. Diverging tax, tariff, and budgetary politics are identified and it is argued that the resulting fiscal externalities have prevented the zone from reaping the full benefits of a monetary union. The paper shows that the devaluation makes it more desirable than ever to have a closer policy coordination to prevent such detrimental fiscal externalities. Recent efforts in this field are reviewed and evaluated. Finally, the paper offers some recommendations with respect to the optimal design of tax and tariff rate structures, and the choice of budgetary convergence criteria.

Ever-increasing bit flip rates caused by shrinking hardware tiles increase the demand for resilient systems. In particular, safety- and functionality-critical system parts need to be protected. Inter-process communication is one such critical part. Applying fault tolerance techniques often comes with a configuration problem, since real-world systems typically have tunable system parameters. These need to be configured with respect to certain optimality criterion. The paper addresses the parameter synthesis problem for inter-process communication protocols that are affected by bit flips. Tunable parameters are the probability of error detection and the expected time interval between system refresh. We provide a tool that automatically generates a model of bit-flip-prone inter-process communication for a given set of processes and their communication structure. The tool is used to exemplarily generate a model of a space probe. Parametric extensions of probabilistic model checking are applied to obtain rational functions for the availability of the space probe and other characteristics. We find a configuration setting that maximizes availability and investigates side effects for this configuration. The paper also compares exemplarily for the space probe model the most-standard probabilistic model checking methods (value iteration, interval iteration, and exact model checking) with respect to their time consumption and accuracy and reveals complexity concerns arising when evaluating the rational functions.

We study the effects of a positive export shock on labor allocation between the informal, microenterprise sector and the formal firm sector in a low-income country. The United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement led to large reductions in US tariffs on Vietnamese exports. We find that the share of manufacturing workers in Vietnam in the formal sector increased by 5 percentage points in response to the US tariff reductions. The reallocation was greater for workers in more internationally integrated provinces and for younger cohorts. We estimate the gap in labor productivity within manufacturing across the informal and formal sectors. This gap and the aggregate labor productivity gain from the export-induced reallocation of workers across the two sectors are reduced when we account for worker heterogeneity, measurement error, and differences in labor intensity of production.

When the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was signed by 23 nations in 1947, the goal was to establish a rules-based world trading system and to facilitate mutually advantageous trade liberalization. As the GATT evolved over time and morphed into the World Trade Organization in 1993, both goals have largely been achieved. The WTO presides over a rule-based trading system based on norms that are almost universally accepted and respected by its 163 members. Tariffs today are below 5 percent on most trade, and zero for a very large share of imports. Despite its manifest success, the WTO is widely regarded as suffering from a deep malaise. The main reason is that the latest WTO negotiation, the Doha Round, has staggered between failures, flops, and false dawns since it was launched in 2001. But the Doha logjam has not inhibited tariff liberalization—far from it. During the last 15 years, most WTO members have massively lowered barriers to trade, investment, and services bilaterally, regionally, and unilaterally—indeed, everywhere except through the WTO. For today's offshoring-linked international commerce, the trade rules that matter are less about tariffs and more about protection of investments and intellectual property, along with legal and regulatory steps to assure that the two-way flows of goods, services, investment, and people will not be impeded. It’s possible to imagine a hypothetical WTO that would incorporate these rules. But the most likely outcome for the future governance of international trade is a two-pillar structure in which the WTO continues to govern with its 1994-era rules while the new rules for international production networks are set by a decentralized process of sometimes overlapping and inconsistent mega-regional agreements.

Growing techno-geopolitical uncertainty affects international business in many ways, calling for more scholarly attention to its causes and multinational enterprise (MNE) responses. The United States CHIPS and Science Act epitomizes the country’s recent embrace of techno-nationalism in its economic rivalry with China, which has major implications for IB scholarship and management practice. The Act exhibits two features that fly against America’s traditional liberal policy stance of championing an open and rules-based multilateral system. First, its reliance on subsidies, export control, and investment screening signifies departure from free trade and from market-based industrial policies. Second, its use of guardrail provisions pursues the weaponization of global value chains for geopolitical and geo-economic purposes. We view the Act as a showcase of a paradigm shift from market-oriented liberalism to intervention-oriented techno-nationalism, heralding a new era of zero-sum thinking and geopolitical prioritization. By examining the broader trend of techno-nationalism, we explore the distinct features of the Act and analyze the geo-strategies that MNEs need to adopt in response to the resulting techno-geopolitical uncertainty. Our analysis highlights the paradigm shift in policymaking, identifies the root causes of this shift, and examines the potential pitfalls it may create. To navigate this uncertain landscape, we suggest four strategic responses for MNEs: geo-strategies, reconfiguration, resilience, and corporate diplomacy.

This paper exploits quasi-experimental variation in tariffs in southern Africa to estimate trade elasticities. Traded quantities respond only weakly to a 30 percent reduction in the average nominal tariff rate. Trade flow data combined with primary data on firm behavior and bribe payments suggest that corruption is a potential explanation for the observed low elasticities. In contexts of pervasive corruption, even small bribes can significantly reduce tariffs, making tariff liberalization schemes less likely to affect the extensive and the intensive margins of firms ' import behavior. The tariff liberalization scheme is, however, still associated with improved incentives to accurately report quantities of imported goods, and with a significant reduction in bribe transfers from importers to public officials.

In the seventh century the kingdom of Samarkand sent formal gifts of fancy yellow peaches, large as goose eggs and with a color like gold, to the Chinese court at Ch'ang-an. What kind of fruit these golden peaches really were cannot now be guessed, but they have the glamour of mystery, and they symbolize all the exotic things longed for, and unknown things hoped for, by the people of the T'ang empire. This book examines the exotics imported into China during the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), and depicts their influence on Chinese life. Into the land during the three centuries of T'ang came the natives of almost every nation of Asia, all bringing exotic wares either as gifts or as goods to be sold. Ivory, rare woods, drugs, diamonds, magicians, dancing girls—the author covers all classes of unusual imports, their places of origin, their lore, their effort on costume, dwellings, diet, and on painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. This book is not a statistical record of commercial imports and medieval trade, but rather a \"humanistic essay, however material its subject matter.\"

When do people care about relative gains in trade? Much of the international relations scholarship—and much of the political rhetoric on trade—would lead us to expect support for a trade policy that benefits ourselves more than it benefits others. Yet, a large interdisciplinary literature also points to the prevalence and importance of other-regarding preferences, rendering the conventional wisdom contestable. We investigate whether and how relative gains influence trade preferences through an original survey experiment in the midst of the China–US trade war. We find that in a win-win scenario, relative gains shape trade opinion: if both sides are gaining, people want to gain more than their foreign trade partner. However, these considerations are offset in a win-lose scenario where the other side is losing out. Relative-gains considerations causally affect opinion on trade, but not in a “beggar-thy-neighbor” or even a “beggar-thy-rival” situation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of relative gains in international relations and provide the first experimental evidence that relative-gains considerations can be offset by other-regarding preferences in international trade.