Books in the World Scientific Studies in International Economics series

Deals with the issue of Asian financial market integration.

Explores the potential and problems of bank safety and efficiency arising from the area of cross-border banking in the form of branches or subsidiaries with primarily only national prudential regulation. This book identifies the protection problems and discusses solutions, such as greater cross-border cooperation, harmonization and organizations.

The aim of the book is to provide interested readers with access to a number of articles that have been written over the years on the subject of the linkages between domestic farm policies (particularly in developed countries) and world markets for agricultural goods.

The Legal and Economic Analysis of the WTO/FTA System presents a collation of interdisciplinary studies covering a wide range of issues from WTO dispute settlement issues to trade remedy systems and FTA negotiations. The author applies legal as well as economic rationales and methods to analyze core issues in the world trading system and in doing so, sheds an interesting light on various trade issues. The interdisciplinary analysis on WTO and FTA issues provides a unique opportunity to reconsider many conventional trade topics. For instance, the author shows that third country dumping rarely used in the GATT/WTO system may have a new role with economic incentives in the context of FTAs.

International Economic Integration and Domestic Labor and Environmental Performance brings together the essays of Mary E Lovely focused on the relationship between international economic integration and domestic performance. It is a collection of sole-authored and co-authored papers that have been published in various scholarly journals over the last two decades. The first section considers the welfare effects and optimal design of retail sales taxes when consumers can avoid taxation by crossing jurisdictional boundaries. The second section highlights the role of scale economies in the design of industrial policies and as a determinant of firm location. The third section explores the influence of environmental policy on foreign investor''s location decisions and the role of trade and technology on country''s environmental regulation. The final section considers the determinants of wage differences, the attraction of low wages for foreign investors, and misallocations of labor in an emerging economy ΓÇö China.The collection, taken as a whole, highlights the power of international factor mobility to determine domestic tax burdens, to influence welfare implications of domestic policy alternatives, and to influence the location of productive factors and their rewards.

Dimensions of Trade Policy collects the author's significant works on international trade policy over almost 30 years of publishing. The articles cover an eclectic range of topics but are grouped into three main areas of concentration — local content protection, the economics of preferential trading areas and the relationship between trade and competition policies — and the book also includes some sui generis topics, such as "fair trade" and "buy local" schemes. An introduction ties the chapters together and indicates their relevance to contemporary matters in trade policy.

As global production has become dispersed worldwide, so have concerns for the plight of workers employed in the world factory. Standard economic intuitions prescribe sharp tradeoffs between the worker-level benefits that a job confers, and the number of such jobs that are ultimately made available. Such quality-quantity tradeoffs have taken center stage in the global debate on potential benefits and costs of legalizing and enforcing international labor standards. This volume organizes and presents a number of new developments in the economics of international labors standards. The first part of this volume explores a series of labor market institutions particularly in developing country labor markets so far unexplored in international labor standards debate. These include the presence of middlemen market power, the persistence of interlinked debt and labor market exploitations, and the origins of two-tiered labor markets. These studies unveil the determinants of workers' well-being and the associated justification for labor market policy interventions when institutions are lopsided favoring contractors, moneylender-cum-employers, and/or select workers blessed with "good" jobs. The second part explores the effectiveness of policy intervention by explicitly recognizing policy implementation challenges. These include coordination failure in the international context, imperfect enforcement and compliance of national labor regulations, and the limits of market-driven fair trade programs. In doing so, these studies shed light on the pitfalls of wholesale international labor standards prescriptions, and advocate instead in favor of case-by-case approach which duly recognize the specific ways in which the labor market deviate from standard assumptions, and the realities of policy implementation and enforcement difficulties.

The Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2010 exposed the existence of significant imperfections in the financial regulatory framework that encouraged excessive risk-taking and increased system vulnerabilities. The resulting high cost of the crisis in terms of lost aggregate income and wealth, and increased unemployment has reinforced the need to improve financial stability within and across countries via changes in traditional microprudential regulation, as well as the introduction of new macroprudential regulations. Amongst the questions raised are:What are the challenges to prudential regulation?How has the regulatory environment changed in recent years?How do the reforms interplay with market discipline, risk-taking incentives and risk management arrangements?Does the new regulatory framework allow for the introduction of financial innovation, and the associated benefits, without increasing disruptive financial risk?