This empirical study extends the public choice literature on the allocation of death during war by examining the political economy of foreign fighter deaths in the Russo-Ukrainian War since the 24 February 2022 invasion. The study explores the roles played by various demographic factors, military institutions, and international trade relations in determining the number of foreign fighters from a variety of countries who have died in support of either Ukraine or Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Unlike other related studies, this study also investigates the importance of, and finds evidence in support of, both economic freedom and a robust democracy in shaping the choices made by individuals around the globe to venture to, and die fighting on, the battlefields of Ukraine.

In an era where legally binding international trade agreements are increasingly shaping domestic regulation in a wide range of areas, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement between the US, Australia, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim Countries, representing over 40% of world trade, has been described as setting the standards for 21st century trade agreements. This article analyses why the negotiations have dragged on for 5 years, and the resistance to the potential impacts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on national democratic decision-making on health, environmental and other public interest regulation.

This article explores the UK vote in 2016 to exit the European Union, colloquially known as ‘Brexit’. Brexit has been portrayed as a British backlash against globalisation and a desire for a reassertion of sovereignty by the UK as a nation-state. In this context, a vote to leave the European Union has been regarded by its protagonists as a vote to ‘take back control’ to ‘make our own laws’ and ‘let in [only] who we want’. We take a particular interest in the stance of key ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK towards regulation, with the example of the labour market. The article commences by assessing the notion of Brexit as a means to secure further market liberalisation. This analysis is then followed by an account of migration as a key issue, the withdrawal process and likely future trajectory of Brexit. We argue that in contrast to the expectations of those who voted Leave in 2016, the UK as a mid-sized open economy will be a rule-taker and will either remain in the European regulatory orbit, or otherwise drift into the American one.

The existing literature shows that transparency and monitoring reduce trade costs, improve regulatory practices and build and sustain trust. In this paper, using 555 specific trade concerns (STCs) raised by the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) committee in the period 1995–2018, we develop a novel classification of STCs. We distinguish between STCs aiming to exchange information (transparency STCs) and those aiming to monitor compliance with the TBT agreement (monitoring STCs). We show that: (i) when STCs intend to foster transparency, they are mainly used in relation to notified measures, thus suggesting that they are used to acquire not only new but also higher quality information than that provided merely by notifications; (ii) when STCs intend to challenge the compliance of WTO members with the TBT Agreement, they primarily address draft measures, thus suggesting that they are used to promote accountability and improve good regulatory practices; and (iii) STCs raised at the draft stage are less likely to escalate to a dispute than those raised on adopted measures. Guided by these findings, we suggest the potential for some reforms to improve the efficiency of the system. These include: introducing a reporting system on the outcome of STCs; using STCs raised in committees to fill the gap of missing notifications; systematically using the STC mechanism at the stage of draft measures; and building in the dispute settlement system the requirement to raise the matter and discuss it within the relevant committee before filing a formal dispute settlement case.

The Latin American debt crisis consumed the 1980s and was not restricted to Latin America. Starting from the August 1982 Mexican weekend, the crisis had three phases: Concerted Lending (1982-5), Baker Plan (1985-9) and Brady Plan (1989 to mid 1990s). This article describes the evolution of the debt strategy and the road to embracing debt write-downs at the end of the decade. In the absence of an external coordinating mechanism, four groups of parties had to reach agreement on any change in the strategy: the borrowing countries, their commercial bank lenders, the home-country authorities of those lenders, and the International Monetary Fund as the principal international institution. Each group could effectively veto any change in the strategy. This need for consensus is lesson number one from the 1980s for today. Lesson number two is that political economy aspects dictated that the strategy be implemented on a case-by-case basis. The article concludes with an application of these lessons to a similar, but even more global, potential debt crisis in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

This paper assesses key issues in the dispute over the United States’ claim that for certain grains China exceeded its limits on domestic support under the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) during 2012–2015. The panel first determined that the base years for the reference price in calculating China's market price support were 1996–1998, rather than 1986–1988 as stipulated in the AoA, and that production in the geographic regions where the support programs operated, not the smaller quantities purchased at administered prices, constituted eligible production. The panel then found China had exceeded its limits in each of the four years for wheat, Indica rice, and Japonica rice. The possibility was left open that a government can determine eligible production by setting maximum purchases at support prices in its regulatory framework. China used this option to claim that its programs for 2020 implemented the recommendations and rulings of the DSB. We argue that use of outdated fixed external reference prices to measure the price gap and to define eligible production by limits on purchases, distance calculation under the AoA from economic support measurement. The measurement issues compound the discord among Members over levels of agricultural support.

Through the analysis of Argentina-World Bank (WB) relations between 1971 and 1976, this article examines how democracies and dictatorships, as well as political and economic constraints did (or did not) impact WB lending to Latin America. This period is especially revealing. Between May 1971 and September 1976, the WB did not grant any new loans to Argentina, thereby generating an exceptional and unusually long break in WB lending to the country. Drawing on previously undisclosed files from the WB Archives and additional primary sources from Argentina and the United States, this article unveils the actual mechanisms, criteria and justification that stood behind the decision to lend or not to lend to Argentina. It maintains that the WB’s self-imposed principle of «neutrality» played a crucial role in facilitating the WB’s relations with Argentina during the politically and economically unstable early 1970s.