Patrick Low

Special and Differential Treatment in the WTO: Why, When and How?

This paper analyses to which extent domestic institutions affect trade flows. We use two complementary approaches, one focusing on the size of total trade flows and one focusing on bilateral trade patterns (gravity equation). Besides, we control for two other domestic policy variables: trade policy and domestic infrastructure. We find that the quality of institutions has a positive and significant impact on a countrys level of openness. Domestic tariffs have no statistically significant impact on their own, but do affect total trade flows when combined with good institutions. Domestic institutions also have a positive and significant impact on bilateral trade flows, but the parameter of our institution variables is reduced by almost a half and may turn insignificant when the quality of domestic infrastructure is included in the regression.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership : a quest for a twenty-first century trade agreement

Part I. Introduction: 1. What is high quality, twenty-first century anyway? Part II. The Past: Origins of the Agreement: 2. An overview and snapshot of the TPP negotiations 3. US PTAs: whats been done and what it means for the TPP negotiations 4. From the P4 to the TPP: transplantation or transformation? 5. Incorporating development among diverse members Part III. The Present: Twenty-First Century Elements and Obstacles: 6. Negotiations over market access in goods 7. Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations: rules of origin 8. Trade in services 9. Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement towards Innovations in Investment Rule-Making 10. The intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership 11. Regulatory coherence in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks 12. Environmental issues in the Trans-Pacific Partnership 13. Labour standards and the TPP 14. What is to be done with export restrictions? Part IV. The Future: High-Quality Meets Regional and Global Realities: 15. Achieving a Free Trade Agreement of the Asia-Pacific: does the TPP present the most attractive path?: 16. APEC and TPP: are they mutually reinforcing? 17. Coping with multiple uncertainties: Latin America in the TPP negotiations 18. The TPP: multilateralizing regionalism or the securization of trade policy? 19. The TPP in a multilateral world Part V. The TPP Negotiations: The Quest for Quality: 20. Conclusions.

The Interface Between the Trade and Climate Change Regimes: Scoping the Issues

As governments increasingly adopt policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, concern has grown on two fronts. First, carbon leakage can occur when mitigation policies are not the same across countries and producers seek to locate in jurisdictions where production costs are least affected by emission constraints. The risk of carbon leakage raises questions about the efficacy of climate change policies in a global sense. Secondly, it is precisely the cost-related consequences of differential mitigation policies that feed industry concerns about competitiveness. We thus have a link between environmental and competitiveness perspectives that fuses climate change and trade regimes in potentially problematic ways as governments contemplate trade actions to manage the environmental and/or competitiveness consequences of differential climate change policies. On the trade side of this relationship, we have the reality that the GATT/WTO rules were not originally drafted to accommodate climate change policies and concerns. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relevance of certain WTO rules to the interface between climate change and trade, focusing in particular on border measures, technical regulations on trade, standards and labelling, and subsidies and countervailing duties. It concludes that in the absence of clear international understandings on how to manage the climate change and trade interface, we run the risk of a clash that compromises the effectiveness of climate change policies as well as the potential gains from specialization through trade.

Customer Empowerment in Healthcare Organisations Through CRM 2.0: Survey Results From Brunei Tracking a Future Path in E – Health Research

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with the Web technology provides healthcare organizations the ability to broaden services beyond its usual practices, and thus provides a particular advantageous environment to achieve complex e-health goals. This paper discusses and demonstrates how a new approach in CRM based on Web 2.0 namely CRM 2.0 will help customers to have greater control in the sense of controlling the process of interaction (empowerment) between healthcare organizations with its customers, and among customers themselves. A survey was conducted to gather preliminary requirements and expectations on empowerment in Brunei. The survey revealed that there is a high demand for empowering customers in Brunei through the Web. Regardless of the limitations of the survey, the general public has responded with a great support for the capabilities of empowerment listed from the questionnaires. The data were analyzed to provide initial ideas and recommendation to a future direction on research for customers empowerment in e-health services.

Empowering clients through e-Health in healthcare services: case Brunei.

The adoption of Web 2.0 in many business sectors is increasing because it offers the ability for customers to have a greater control in generating contents to their personalized web. Customers are empowered in the sense of controlling the process of interaction(s) between a firm with its customers, and among customers themselves. However, providing empowerment in any state of interaction levels to customers (patients) in a healthcare organization is challenging. Many healthcare organizations have adopted empowerment in their e-health scenario; therefore, it needs a mechanism to measure at which level they have implemented empowerment within their organizations. This article proposes three layers of customers empowerment in e-health systems based on a reference model called Personal Health Cycle (PHC). The layers of empowerment are personal, social, and medical layers respectively. The modular approach is used to simplify healthcare organizations identifying which modules to be adopted in implementing a strategy for customers empowerment. The model is derived based on recent studies of empowerment in healthcare organizations. A survey also has been conducted in Brunei Darussalam (Brunei) to verify and improve our initial model and to understand the responses of people regarding empowerment in the e-health services. Questions for the survey are derived from the features of the PHC. The respondents reacted positively to the features of empowerment proposed. We use PHC to define and distinguish electronic health record (EHR) from electronic medical record (EMR).

WTO decision-making for the future

Decision making in the WTO has become ever more difficult as the number of members increases and the range of issues tackled broadens. This paper looks at reasons why aspects of decision-making might be changed and discusses a number of potential pitfalls that change would have to avoid, such as a dilution of commitments and fragmentation of the multilateral trading system. It then takes a detailed look at the notion of critical mass decision-making. It argues for this approach under certain conditions, as it would: i) allow for the emergence of a more progressive and responsive WTO agenda; ii) blunt the diversion of trade cooperation initiatives to RTAs; iii) allow more efficient differentiation in the levels of rights and obligations among a community of highly diverse economies; and iv) promote greater efficiency in multilaterally-based negotiations on trade rules, and perhaps, sectoral market access agreements.

Governments, non-state actors and trade policy-making : negotiating preferentially or multilaterally

Introduction 1. The domestic politics of trade policy-making: state and non-state actor interactions and forum choice Ann Capling and Patrick Low 2. Chile Sebastian Herreros 3. Colombia Hernando J. Gomez and Javier Gamboa 4. Mexico Jaime Zabludovsky and Linda Pasquel 5. Indonesia Alexander C. Chandra and Lutfiyah Hanim 6. Thailand Thitinan Pongsudhirak 7. Jordan Riad Al Khouri 8. Kenya Njuguna Ngethe and Jacob Omolo 9. South Africa Peter Draper, Tsidiso Disenyana and Gilberto Biacuana 10. The influence of international non-state actors in multilateral and preferential trade agreements: a question of forum shopping? Maria Perez-Esteve 11. Main findings and conclusions Ann Capling and Patrick Low.

Managing the Challenges of WTO Participation

This 2005 compilation of 45 case studies documents disparate experiences among economies in addressing the challenges of participating in the WTO. It demonstrates that success or failure is strongly influenced by how governments and private sector stakeholders organise themselves at home. The contributors, mainly from developing countries, give examples of participation with lessons for others. They show that when the system is accessed and employed effectively, it can serve the interests of poor and rich countries alike. However, a failure to communicate among interested parties at home often contributes to negative outcomes on the international front. Above all, these case studies demonstrate that the WTO creates a framework within which sovereign decision-making can unleash important opportunities or undermine the potential benefits flowing from a rules-based international environment that promotes open trade.

Managing cooperation on climate change: What can we learn from the WTO?

Governments are striving to define the terms of international cooperation to address climate change. This paper considers whether there are lessons to be learned from more than six decades of international cooperation on trade through the GATT/WTO. It argues that in comparison to trade cooperation, the climate change negotiations are taking place against a background of great uncertainty, a long gap in time between actions and results, significant distributional issues, basic differences among parties in terms of the appropriate balance of national responsibilities for action, and sharp differences over policy approaches. All these factors make the negotiations more complex and less likely to result in the kind of detailed policy commitments that characterize the GATT/WTO. Nevertheless, the paper argues that excessive imprecision or reliance or voluntarism at the national level will result in insufficient effort to address the challenges of climate change. A universal agreement with differentiated but clear obligations, a phased approach to the assumption of these obligations, and creative flexibilities offer the best chance of success.

Father Leadership in Kazakhstan

Here in this chapter, father leadership is examined in relation to small business leadership and management in Kazakhstan. However, it can also be applied to project management.