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Journal Article
So what if GATT isn't NAFTA?
Journal Article
Japan's economy still looks recessionary
Journal Article
Trade, WTO and the environment
Journal Article
Was NAFTA behind Mexico's high maquiladora growth?
Although Mexico's maquiladora system is an important and well-recognized component of Mexico-U.S. trade, the connection between the acceleration in maquiladora growth and NAFTA is less clearly understood. A broad cross section of observers -- including journalists, political activists, industry analysts, and academics -- argue that Mexico's maquiladoras have been strongly influenced by NAFTA and have grown rapidly as a result. William C. Gruben finds no such connection when he tests for NAFTA's contribution to fluctuations in maquiladora employment. Instead, he finds that maquiladoras' ...
Journal Article
GATT and the new protectionism
The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is the first agreement of its kind that reduces or eliminates tariffs on many goods and addresses issues related to intellectual property rights, trade in services and agricultural subsidies. With good reason, it has generated much optimism about the future of free world trade. ; But does GATT's trade liberalization today mean that trade will remain liberalized tomorrow? Increasingly, governments are counteracting the perceived unfair trade practices of other nations with their own trade barriers. While concerns about ...
Working Paper
Financial liberalization, market discipline and bank risk
In the literature on systemic banking crises, two common themes are: (1) Risky lending often follows bank liberalization. (2) Lack of market discipline encourages risky lending. That not all liberalizations are followed by financial crisis and that financial systems without market discipline sometimes operate without incident invites examination of these themes. In a test of six countries, we find that our measure of bank risk increases significantly in the wake of financial liberalizations, but only where depositors fail to discipline banks. Our measures of market discipline and bank risk, ...
Journal Article
Policy priorities and the Mexican exchange rate crisis
Mexico's December 1994 devaluation and subsequent financial crisis came as a surprise even to some analysts who focus on Latin American financial markets. This article outlines the events leading up to the devaluation and discusses the tension that mounted throughout 1994 between policies to address growing banking-sector problems in Mexico, the policies designed to preserve the nation's exchange rate regime, and the pressures induced by rising U.S. interest rates. The article concludes that-while each difficulty impeded the resolution of the other-the explosive nature of the ensuing crisis ...
Journal Article
U.S. inflation and the international economy
Working Paper
How much does international trade affect business cycle synchronization ?
In a recent article, Jeffrey Frankel and Andrew Rose (1998) examine the hypothesis that greater trade flows between two countries cause greater synchronicity between their business cycles. The increase in business cycle synchronicity may be seen as rationalizing a common monetary policy and, so, a shared currency. Arguing that product specialization would lower the synchronicity of business cycles, Frankel and Rose posit that a regression of output correlation on overall trade will indicate whether (positive) common demand shocks and productivity spillovers dominate or (negative) ...