The contribution of non–reciprocal preference schemes to least–developed countries (LDC) export performance is a topic of active debate. This paper examines the impact of a broad–based reform of the Canadian General System of Preferences (GSP) for LDC scheme on the export performance of LDCs in the textiles and clothing sector. The results indicate that a more flexible GSP scheme not only boosted the export volume, but also increased the number of product categories that were exported. The paper thus provides further confirmation that appropriately designed non–reciprocal preference schemes may help promote the export performance of LDCs.

This book analyzes the challenges faced by the postal infrastructure in many developing countries at the dawn of the 21st century. On the one hand, market fragmentation, lack of regulatory framework, wrong pricing strategies and bureaucracy in a "just-in-time" world constitute the major hurdles to the development of economically viable and sustainable postal networks. On the other hand, the capillarity of these networks has shown a real comparative advantage in achieving financial inclusion of the less better-off, or facilitating access to export markets for micro, small and medium-size enterprises. The book provides advanced analysis in these areas, and concludes with the discussion of the triptych "liberalization, privatization, and regulation" applied to the postal sector.

With more than 80% of post offices in Sub-Saharan Africa located in small- and medium-sized cities and rural areas, a well-managed postal network, in strong partnership with other providers of infrastructure and network services, could establish itself as a critical link that binds all other networks together, and helps move the "unconnected" out of the poverty trap.

A large body of theoretical literature has been recently produced about two-sided markets (e.g. Armstrong (2005), Rochet and Tirole (2003)). Yet very little empirical research has followed. This paper provides the first application of two-sided markets theories to the analysis of communication infrastructure development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The paper highlights that the relative pricing currently applied to each side of postal communication platforms (i.e. senders and recipients) prevents indirect positive network externalities from arising in the long run, thereby jeopardizing the development of businesses to customers communication. Club effects in SSA are estimated through a dynamic panel data econometric analysis which follows Arellano and Bond's seminal paper (1991). Good quality of service appears as a pre-requisite to any sustainable increase in access to communication through a pricing allowing cross-subsidization of recipients by senders; otherwise increased access may well lead to lower communication levels as suggested by the dynamic panel econometric results.

Four topics in economics of public governance with strategic production of information are covered in this research. Most of them are also related to trade policies. The first topic deals with the privatization of customs' revenue collection. The second is related to special interests groups' capture of political authority through the provision of information, and does take into account the possible different levels of conflict and inequality between groups. The third assesses the lobbying of declining industries with the provision of information to politicians. And the fourth is a study of the electorate's rationality within a direct democracy system.

Posts are very often not considered among the key infrastructures of a country in order to explain economic growth. We replicate Calderón and Servén's (2004) exercise which was evaluating the impact of infrastructures (yet not including posts) on economic growth. We find that the postal network is also relevant to economic development and growth.

Whereas a lot has been written about the postal sector in industrialized countries, there has been little about the development of postal markets in developing countries (DCs). The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it underlines the fact that postal economics models developed for industrialized countries (ICs) should not be transposed to DCs. Instead, a number of specificities of DCs should be taken into account in any economic analysis of the postal sector. Second, it provides new econometric results regarding the drivers of domestic letter-post development in DCs, highlighting the necessity of clustering the analysis within various groups of countries. By so doing, a number of new effects appear beyond the traditional link between the GDP and the volume of mail per capita. For low-income countries the latter is no longer statistically significant. The research also captures the negative impact of “laissez-faire” policies on the postal development of many Latin American countries. Consequently, an in-depth analysis of the lack of development of Latin American postal markets is carried out, revealing clear symptoms of destructive unregulated competition. The subsequent high market fragmentation in the region does not seem to favour the development of sufficiently large economies of scale, and is thus likely to disable postal markets' growth.

Populares or optimates? Special interests groups compete for the acquisition and further transmission of information to an imperfectly informed government. For high enough levels of conflict between special interests groups, a group with a higher stake may decide not to get organized into a lobby because efforts made for producing information may turn out to be useless in order to capture political authority. This is because, for the low-stake group, a higher conflict or a higher stake asymmetry (e.g. income inequality) acts as a motivation device for capturing more political authority, provided that the government is not systematically biased towards the high-stake groups' interests. This opportunity cost of unbiased governance for the high-stake groups could provide microfoundations to help explain why the lack of consensus (conflict) and inequality hinder the development of democracy in many countries (or threat it in others), their later belonging to international governance and regulation bodies, or their later adoption of regulatory authorities in many sectors (and even the high fragmentation and compartmentalization of regulatory power in some industries such as banking and finance, or the resistance to move from domestic to international regulation), that is why good governance (pursuing general welfare) is so often impaired both geographically and at the sector level. Eventually, governments with high levels of independent information in their hands face less one-sided capture by the low-stake group (e.g. less tempted by populism) in a well-functioning democracy. There is thus a trade-off between populism on the one hand, and good governance on the other hand, because democracy enables populism when governments are highly uninformed on their own while facing increasing inequality and lower consensus among constituents.

Roll call voting at U.S. Congress has been extensively studied, but its analyses have often focused on the question: do electoral campaign contributions buy policies? By so-doing, expenditures in informing politicians were omitted. Our empirical investigation of the intra-industry competition for political influence in the steel industry uses both PAC electoral campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures data according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. A U.S. roll call vote is analyzed at the firm level for the first time, thus avoiding sectoral aggregation of PAC contributions. Econometric results supports the view of informational lobbying expenditures being a complement to PAC contributions and enabling vertical differentiation; resources spent in informational lobbying increase the quality of PAC contributions and thereby increased the political support for trade protection as low-profit steel producers were requiring.

This paper analyses the EEA and bilateral agreements vote results at the level of 3025 communities of the Swiss Confederation by simultaneously modelling the vote and the participation decisions. Regressions include economic and political factors. The economic variables are the aggregated shares of people employed in the losing, winning and neutral sectors, according to BRUNETTI, JAGGI and WEDER (1998) classification, which follows a Ricardo-Viner logic, and the average education levels, which follows a Heckscher-Ohlin approach. The political factors are those used in the recent literature. The results are extremely precise and consistent. Most variables have the predicted sign and are significant at the 1 % level. More than 80 % of the communities' vote variance is explained by the model, substantially reducing the residuals when compared to former studies. The political variables do have the expected signs and are significant as well. Our results underline the importance of the interaction between electoral choice and participation decisions as well as the importance of simultaneously dealing with those issues. Eventually they reveal the electorate's high level of information and rationality.

All preferential trading agreements (PTAs) short of a customs union use rules of origin (ROO) to prevent trade deflection. ROO raise production costs and create administrative costs. This paper argues that in the case of the recent wave of North–South PTAs, the presence of ROO virtually limits the market access that these PTAs confer to the Southern partners. In the case of NAFTA, we find average compliance costs around 6% in ad valorem equivalent, undoing the tariff preference (4% on average) for a large number of tariff lines. Administrative costs amount to 47% of the preference margin. These findings are coherent with the view that North–South PTAs could well be viewed like a principal–agent problem in which the Southern partners are just about left on their participation constraint.

This paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of private surveillance firms to the generation of information and describing how incentives for underinvoicing and collusive behaviour between importers and customs are affected by the introduction of PSI. It is shown theoretically that the introduction of PSI has an ambiguous effect on the level of fraud. Empirically, our econometric results suggest that the introduction of PSI services increased underinvoicing in Argentina and Indonesia, and reduced it in the Philippines.