Matthias Lücke

WTO Accession Issues

For many applicant countries, accession to the WTO has been, and still is, a frustratingly slow process. In this paper, we discuss the substantial, contentious issues that are slowing down progress in accession negotiations. We contrast these with the benefits of WTO accession not only to the applicant countries, but also to the multilateral trading system as a whole and, hence, to current members. Against this background, we suggest a strategy to accelerate accession without diluting the ground rules of the multilateral trading system.

European trade with lower-income countries and the relative wages of the unskilled: an exploratory analysis for West Germany and the UK

This paper develops a Heckscher-Ohlin-type framework in which relative factor prices are affected by output prices as well as by total factor productivity growth. The empirical analysis finds no evidence that the relative prices of unskilled-labour- intensive manufactures, adjusted for total factor productivity growth, declined after 1970 to depress the wages or employment opportunities (in the presence of an inflexible wage structure) of unskilled labour. Similarly, neither in West Germany nor in the UK did changes in the commodity composition of foreign trade reflect a sustained rise in the stock of unskilled labour in the rest of the world (which they should if labour markets were strongly affected by growing developing country exports).

REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION'S EXPORT EARNINGS OUTSIDE THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR REGIONAL ECONOMIC AUTONOMY

The distribution of foreign export earnings by area of origin is analyzed for the Russian Federation, to convertible and non-convertible currency areas, as well as for four major commodity categories. The paper focuses on identifying, because of Russias narrow export composition, oblast-level units (and commodities) that contribute disproportionately to the Federations overall convertible currency earnings. It then explores the implications of the extremely uneven spatial districution of such earnings for the Russian governments efforts to devise a workable formula for distributing export revenues between the “Center” and the localities.