We analyse the ‘indirect effects’ of Brexit on African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries’ exports that use the UK as a platform to access the EU market and vice versa. First, we use the EORA26 multi-region input–output database for 186 countries and 26 sectors to characterize the ACP domestic content embedded in bilateral trade between the UK and the EU. Second, we apply the GTAP-VA module to carry out a simulation of how the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement will impinge on 121 countries and 65 products. The results suggest that while ‘indirect effects’ on ACP countries’ exports may exist, their economic magnitude is small in aggregate because ACP countries supply only small amounts of inputs used in UK–EU bilateral trade. Our simulations also show that these effects may be offset by the likely increase in ACP domestic content in exports because of TCA friction, mainly towards the UK.

This paper examines the impact of trade-related technology diffusion from G7 countries to Latin America and East Asia on total factor productivity controlling for education, governance, and distance. We build on the trade and distance-focused strands of the technology diffusion literature and find that (i) total factor productivity (TFP) increases with education, trade, and governance (ETG) and declines with distance to the G7 countries; (ii) increasing Latin America's ETG to East Asia's level would double TFP, accounting for about 75% of the TFP gap between the two country groups; and (iii) South America's greater remoteness relative to Mexico's from the US and Canada significantly reduces its TFP and similarly for Singapore's greater remoteness from Japan relative to Hong Kong.

The title of this article is a riff off a publication of G. C. Harcourt’s 1974 piece, ‘The social consequences of inflation’. He wrote this in a period of the global economy that bears some strong similarities to our own contemporary phase when inflation is suddenly back in the global headlines. There is at least one significant difference: at that time, Harcourt highlighted inflation as the outcome of an excess of total demand in real terms over available supplies of goods and services when the potential workforces and existing stocks of capital goods were fully employed. Current inflationary pressures, by contrast, arise from the combination of specific sectoral supply bottlenecks, rising profit margins in oligopolistic global markets for food and fuel and financial speculation in these markets.

Far from being an event of a decade ago, the 2008 global financial crisis is a manifestation of an ongoing crisis of the world order, with social, political and ecological dimensions that cannot be seen separately from each other. The root cause of the crisis can be traced back to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and the failure to design an equitable and inclusive global financial and economic governance architecture consistent with the changed global economic realities. The vacuum was quickly taken up by the neoliberal orthodoxy that pushed the agenda of wholesale liberalisation, resulting in unprecedented domination of speculative finance capital and multinational corporation–led globalisation. This has seen falling share of wages in national income, growing wealth concentration, rising income inequality and ballooning of household debts. The consequence was frequent and increasingly deeper and wider financial crises.

We employ matching methods to explore the relationships between foreign aid flows and corruption in recipient countries. Data are drawn from recipients of foreign aid for the 1996–2013 period. We find no compelling evidence of an effect running from corruption to aid flows. Furthermore, point estimates imply that corruption reforms lead countries to receive less aid. Alternatively, we generally find that, over a 10-year horizon, a sustained increase in aid leads to more corruption in a recipient. It is the sustained nature of an aid increase that seems to be important for this effect. (We generally do not report significant results for large changes in aid that are not sustained over time.)

A recent wave of scholarship attests that the liberal world order is under threat. Although there is disagreement about the underlying reasons for this diagnosis, there are few attempts to further our understanding of how the liberal order can be reinvigorated. This paper probes the potential of blockchain technology to promote international cooperation. Blockchain technology is a data structure that enables global governance stakeholders to establish decentralized governance systems which provide high-powered incentives for enhanced cooperation. By outlining the contours of a blockchain-based global governance system for climate policy, the paper illustrates that blockchain technology holds theoretical promise to foster cooperation in three ways: leveraging new sources of information through blockchain-based prediction markets; allaying coordinating problems through reducing the cost of transactions for side payments; and allowing states and other global governance actors to make more credible commitments given guaranteed execution of blockchain-enabled smart contracts. By empowering local knowledge holders and non-state actors that traditionally lacked the means to coordinate efforts to influence global politics, blockchain technology also promises to advance an international order based on liberal values. In actuality, however, emerging blockchain-based global governance systems will fall short of the libertarian ideal of ‘fully-automated liberalism’ as their design and operation will remain under the shadow of power.

This article examines Argentine relations with multilateral agencies and bankers during the first years of the last military dictatorship. It begins with an overview of relations and the external situation before the rise of the military and why a new economic team sought and restored Argentine credit standing. There follows a review of how links with the U.S. Treasury and international institutions lost significance and how cross-country financial intermediation, carried out mainly by leading state banks, gave foreign bankers a key role in the financing of Argentina’s foreign exchange needs. It also emphasises explicit and underlying motivations in the behaviour and policies of all actors involved and offers an evaluation of former Minister Martínez de Hoz’s efforts to justify these policies in the early 1980s.

This paper models how migration both influences and responds to differences in disease prevalence between cities and shows how the possibility of migration away from high-prevalence areas affects long-run steady state disease prevalence. We develop a dynamic framework where migration responds to the prevalence of disease, to the costs of migration and to the costs of living. The model explores how pressure for migration in response to differing equilibrium levels of disease prevalence generates differences in city characteristics such as land rents. Competition for scarce housing in low-prevalence areas can create segregation, with disease concentrated in high-prevalence “sinks”. We show that policies affecting migration costs affect the steady-state disease prevalences across cities. In particular, migration can reduce steady-state disease incidence in low-prevalence areas while having no impact on prevalence in high-prevalence areas. This suggests that, in some circumstances, public health measures may need to avoid discouraging migration away from high-disease areas.

In a two-country Ricardian model, we study the dynamics of intersectoral reallocation of labour following upon a once and for all move to free trade. The job creation/destruction process in both sectors is slow and this results in unemployment during the transition toward the long run free trade equilibrium. We identify different free trade regimes depending on whether or not the world relative price is between the two autarkic prices. In some regimes, one of the two countries overshoots its autarkic equilibrium i.e. temporarily specializes according to its comparative disadvantage. In that case, welfare increases in both countries. In other regimes, the adjustment process is monotonic in both countries but welfare increases in only one country. When the two countries have “very” different rates of job creation/ destruction, the world price adjusts in such a way that the difference in adjustment speed between the two countries decreases.