During the last decade, the services sector has seen modest liberalization on account of removal of trade and investment barriers. Most of the WTO members are committed to multilateral liberalization in services trade. However, within trade in services sector, the liberalization of education services has seen little progress. Education services sector liberalization exerts an economy-wide influence as they constitute strong inputs to all other economic activities, including trade. Some earlier studies identified several challenges related to the implementation of GATS commitments.

Among the 14 Pacific island countries (PICs), Fiji, with its relatively better endowments in land and human resources as well as physical infrastructure, has been one of the ten favourite destinations of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Asia-Pacific. Past studies confirm that FDI contributed to economic growth of Fiji. Firstly, it added to domestic savings and reduced the resource gaps and cushioned them against possible adverse effects of current account deficits.

Agriculture has been the most protected and distorted sector in the AsiaPacific region similar to many regions in the world. Many countries in the region are currently following a combined approach to agricultural trade reform. While many of them have been making some progress towards multilateral trade liberalisation through the WTO trade negotiations and regional trade liberalisation through RTAs, they have been successful in concluding a large number of BTAs. A growing amount of research is now being conducted on the effects of agricultural trade liberalisation.

The improved terms of trade for Indonesia, as a result of the sharp exchange rate depreciation after the 1997/98 economic crisis, was expected to improve the country’s export performance. As documented by some studies, however, the evidence conflicts the prediction. Although some explanations have been offered in the literature, those which focus on firm behaviour are scarce, and almost all of these concentrate on macroeconomic factors.

The term of “information society” was first introduced by Malchup and Porat in the 1970s. Since then information has increasingly been considered as a critical factor in the development process. Various scholars have used information deficiencies to explain development differences among countries and argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) 1 may facilitate and speed up the development process by providing cheaper and more efficient ways and tools of information gathering, processing and dissemination.

Trade costs include all costs incurred in getting a good to a final user other than the marginal cost of producing the good itself, such as transportation costs (both freight costs and time costs), policy barriers (tariffs and non-tariff barriers), information costs, contract enforcement costs, costs associated with the use of different currencies, legal and regulatory costs, and local distribution costs (wholesale and retail). Higher trade costs is an obstacle to trade and it impedes the realization of gains from trade liberalisation...

Several South Asian countries have joined the current wave of bilateral and subregional free trade agreements (FTA) in the region. The dynamics of regional cooperation is supported by the rapid economic expansion which is creating complementarities for trade expansion. The economic expansion in South Asia has shown divergence in performance. The number of FTAs has gone to as high as 23 in the region of which one is a sub-regional trade grouping (BIMST-EC) and one regional trade agreement (SAFTA) while there are 21 bilateral trade agreements in the region.

The GSP scheme was initiated by UNCTAD in 1968 with the objective of enabling developing country exports to enter developed country markets under preferential rates. Sri Lanka has been a beneficiary under the GSP scheme over the last three decades. However, meeting the scheme’s objective of export expansion seems to have fallen short and Sri Lanka has not been able to export effectively under the EU and US GSP schemes, which are the most important non-reciprocal preference arrangements providing access to Sri Lanka’s main export markets.

In many developing countries, the health-care sector is under-developed, lacking basic infrastructure and human capital, and attracting little attention from investors and policymakers. While encouraging globalization and trade may aggravate those problems and create additional costs in some circumstances, trade liberalization and deeper integration into the global economy could also provide opportunities and resources to address those problems more effectively.

The South Asian Economies comprising Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (SAEs) represent 22 percent of world’s population but they only account for just over 1 percent of world’s trade. In 2003, agricultural trade in the SAEs amounted to US$ 22 billion and it accounted for approximately 4 percent of world’s agricultural trade and 23 percent of the regional trade. During the 1970s, SAEs had highly protected trade regimes supported by high tariffs, Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) and stringent controls on exchange.