The theme of this paper is that current difficulties in the United States economy and vulnerabilities in emerging markets are not unrelated to financial excesses that made a major contribution to global expansion in the past six years, including credit, asset and investment bubbles triggered by rapid expansion of global liquidity.

Global trade and investment has expanded over the past several decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, a region hampered by political instability and governance problems, lack of foreign investment, and other barriers – the opposite has occurred.

Africa’s share of world exports has dropped by nearly two-thirds in three decades from 2.9 percent in 1976 to 0.9 percent in 2006. If Africa’s share of world exports had kept at the same level as the 1970’s its export revenue would be approx more...

Corruption is the main barrier to trade and investment between the European Union and Latin America, a survey showed.

Seventy to eighty percent of EU companies developing partnerships in Latin America said they suffered from graft.
The survey by Eurochambres, the association of European chambers of commerce, found the cost of transport and logistics, tariff levels, the legal and security environment, and non-tariff and customs procedures as the next biggest factors preventing a higher leve more...

Published annually since 1968, the Review provides an analysis of structural and cyclical changes affecting trade, much of which is amongst multinationals, and transport, especially in developing countries.

Abstract: "We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries -- close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich countries. The share of vertical FDI (subsidiaries which provide inputs to their parent firms) is larger than commonly thought, even within developed countries. More than half of all vertical s more...

Abstract: "This paper studies the relationship between multinational firm proximity and the formation of new export connections by private Chinese exporters between 1997 and 2003. The results indicate that growth in the presence of multinational firms is positively associated with the formation of new trade by local Chinese firms. Further exploration suggests that information spillovers may drive this result, as the positive association due to own-industry multinational presence is particularly more...

Abstract: "In a number of influential papers published by V. N. Balasubramanyam and collaborators during the decade of the 1990s, compelling arguments and supporting evidence was presented to indicate that export-promoting trade and investment strategies attract more and more productive inflows of foreign capital than do import-substituting strategies. This paper revisits these hypotheses in the context of more recent cross-section data and reports evidence to suggest that the earlier findings a more...

European politicians began puzzling over tax harmonisation in 1962. It was the year Americans dedicated themselves to sending man to the moon before the end of the decade. American space travel was a triumph; Europeans have had a harder time realising their dream. But now European Union plans for a common tax base have begun to gain pace and may even take wing, in spite of several countries' efforts to stop them.

Trade between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and Asia-Pacific (AP),
1
that had increased
substantially -albeit from a small base- in the first half of the 1990s, began to slow down after the
outbreak of the economic and financial crisis in Asia in mid-1997 and the ensuing severe economic
recession in the majority of LAC countries. The incipient drive in bi-regional trade up to the Asian
crisis was triggered by the economic boom of the majority of AP countries on the one hand, and
g more...

Foreign direct investment in London has jumped to £52bn from £38bn two years ago, with India now the second biggest source, a survey has said.