The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a big deal in the making. With the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations at an impasse, the TPP negotiations have taken center stage as the most significant trade initiative of the 21st century. As of December 2012, negotiators have made extensive progress in 15 negotiating rounds since the talks began in March 2010, though hard work remains to finish the deal in the coming year or so. Despite this effort, however, the TPP is not well understood. In part, the reason lies in the dynamism of the TPP initiative. Unlike other free trade pacts, the...

While global trade negotiations remain stalled, two tracks of trade negotiations in the Asia-Pacific--the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and a parallel Asian track--could generate momentum for renewed liberalization and provide pathways to region-wide free trade. This book investigates what these trade negotiations could mean to the world economy. Petri, Plummer, and Zhai estimate that world income would rise by $295 billion per year on the TPP track, by $766 billion if both tracks are successful, and by $1.9 trillion if the tracks ultimately combine to yield region-wide...

Over the past five years China has emerged as the world's largest global surplus economy; indeed by 2007-08 the size of its surplus relative to its GDP was of a magnitude unprecedented for a large trading economy. This development is especially surprising since in the first twenty-five years of economic reform China's trade and current account surpluses were quite small by East Asian standards, averaging less than 2 percent of GDP.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the key economic challenges facing the Chinese authorities in light of the still undervalued exchange rate, the...

This study assesses the US-Morocco free trade agreement (FTA) and identifies shortcomings in the implementation of the US-Morocco FTA, provide policy recommendations for better leveraging the FTA, and suggest ways for Morocco to take better advantage of its cooperation agreements with the European Union. The study consists of four components. First, the study uses statistical and modeling work to compare the experience of the US-Morocco FTA with the experiences of US FTAs with Chile and Jordan. Second, the study provides a qualitative analysis of the US FTAs with Chile and Jordan to suggest...

The global economic and financial crisis has awakened protectionist sentiments around the world, and policymakers have failed to actively seek trade liberalization. In light of this, some have proposed abandoning the Doha Round and starting over with a new agenda. Figuring Out the Doha Round argues that this is far from the time to drop the Doha Round and that it is now more important than ever to sustain political support for the rules-based multilateral trade system.

This important new study recommends modest increments in market access commitments by G-20 countries beyond tariff...

Will the Obama administration's decision to normalize relations with Cuba usher in a new era of economic cooperation, trade, and investment between the two countries? This prescient book, published only eight months before President Obama's historic announcement at the end of 2014, provides answers to that question and offers a roadmap for a sequenced lifting of the Cold War era economic sanctions against Cuba.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Barbara Kotschwar lay out the difficulties of achieving a dynamic economic relationship. They caution that a unilateral dismantling of US sanctions without...

The global financial crisis produced an important agreement among regulators in 2010-11 to raise capital requirements for banks to protect them from insolvency in the event of another emergency. In this book, William R. Cline, a leading expert on the global financial system, employs sophisticated economic models to analyze whether these reforms, embodied in the Third Basel Accord, have gone far enough. He calculates how much higher bank capital reduces the risk of banking crises, providing a benefit to the economy. On the cost side, he estimates how much higher capital requirements raise the...

The world is poised on the threshold of economic changes that will reduce the income gap between the rich and poor on a global scale while reshaping patterns of consumption. Rapid economic growth in emerging-market economies is projected to enable consumers worldwide to spend proportionately less on food and more on transportation, goods, and services, which will in turn strain the global infrastructure and accelerate climate change. The largest gains will be made in poorer parts of the world, chiefly sub-Saharan Africa and India, followed by China and the advanced economies. In this new...

In the decades before the global financial crisis struck in 2007, economic policymakers kept to the primary goal of containing inflation and public deficits. Today, after years of sluggish economic recovery, the time has come for that prevailing consensus to give way to a new strategy of monetary stimulus to spur economic growth and encourage risk-taking by investors. In this book, Angel Ubide surveys the actions taken by central banks after the crisis and draws lessons from the unpredictable interaction of markets, countries, and financial institutions. He concludes that fear of another...

Spurred by the success of the first stress test of US banks toward the end of the global economic crisis in 2009, stress testing of large financial institutions has become the cornerstone of banking supervision worldwide. The aim of the tests is to determine which banks are adequately capitalized under severe economic shocks and to order corrective measures for those that are vulnerable. In Banking's Final Exam, one of the world's leading experts on banking regulation concludes that the tests administered on both sides of the Atlantic suffer from fundamental weaknesses, leading to a false...