Today's international trade is radically more complex. The revolution in information and communication technologies fostered an internationalisation of supply chains which created a nexus between trade, investment, and services which is at the heart of so much of today's international commerce. The degree of recent change has created an uncertainty that now demands new global trade systems - a new set of rules for the new environment. This book tackles some of the unresolved issues in international trade that will continue to press into the next decades. Covering an array of topics critical to today's scholar, economic policy designer and business leader, the book International Trade from Economic and Policy Perspective is comprised of four sections: International Trade Theories, Trade Patterns, Government Policies and International Trade, and Business Perspective of International Trade.

Economic diversification remains at the top of the agenda for hundreds of regions around the world. From the single commodity economies of African countries and the Caribbean, to the many single industry regions of Europe and North America, as well as the oil and gas rich but volatile hydrocarbon economies. Economic diversification policies have been around for almost a century with varying degrees of success and failure. Economic Diversification Policies in Natural Resource Rich Economies takes a special interest in the policy experiences of a set of different countries that have extractive industries representing significant drivers of their economies and subsequently are significant contributors to government revenues. It explores twelve cases including upper-middle to high income economies such as Canada, Australia, Iceland and Norway, emerging economies such as Latin America, the GCC (Saudi and UAE), Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Russia, as well as the developing economy of Uganda. Each chapter provides a review of economic diversification experiences including policy environment, diversification strategies, desired outcomes, the role of government, and a critical evaluation of achievements. This book is suitable for those who study environmental economics, development economics and resource management.

When countries discover that they possess large deposits of oil and natural gas, the news is usually welcome. Yet, paradoxically, if they rely on their wealth of natural resources, they often set down a path of poor economic performance and governance challenges. Only a few resource-rich countries have managed to develop their economies fully and provide a better and sustainable standard of living for large segments of their populations. This phenomenon, known as the resource curse, is a core challenge for energy-exporting states. Beyond the Resource Curse focuses on this relationship between natural wealth and economic security, discussing the particular pitfalls and consistent perils facing oil- and gas-exporting states. The contributors to this volume look beyond the standard fields of research related to the resource curse. They also shed new light on the specific developmental problems of resource-rich exporting states around the globe, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cambodia, East Timor, Iran, Norway, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. Policy makers and academics think of energy security solely in terms of the interests of energy importers. Beyond the Resource Curse shows that the constant volatility in energy markets creates energy security challenges for exporters as well.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.

This book compares models of low-rent and high-rent development to explain the divergent growth of regions and to query the continued prioritization of industrialization over agriculture and export services as the engine of economic prosperity.