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The purpose of this paper is to measure the effects of WTO accession on the economic growth of China, and the paths of those effects.

This article carries out a theoretical and empirical analysis on the effect on China's economic growth from WTO accession. First is about the theoretical analysis of the paths of those effects which WTO accession has on China's economic growth. Next is to make empirical test about the effects through dummy variable regression and cross variable analysis.

WTO accession has a remarkable and a positive effect on China's economic growth through the following specific paths, i.e. foreign trade path, economic system reform path and FDI path. But so far entry into WTO has not positively influenced China's economic growth through technological innovation.

Based on the theoretical and empirical analysis, this article puts forward relative policies and suggestions on what China should do in the future.

The European Union (EU) has recently been significantly enlarged with the addition of ten countries. This was expected to induce telecommunications operators in the original EU15 to invest heavily in operators in the accession countries. This paper seeks to analyse the extent to which this has occurred in practice.

The pattern of licence ownership and subscriber numbers in the EU25 is set out for 30 June 2004. The market position of eight operators likely to have played a role in investing in accession countries is examined and the level of concentration in every market is calculated. A number of case studies of operators are generated and an overall conclusion reached as to whether accession has indeed evinced a strategic response, or is likely to do so during 2005.

The results show that there has been no uniform response by operators in the EU15 to the onset of accession, and rather less investment overall than had been anticipated. This is explained by a variety of factors such as lack of investments providing majority control, financial constraints and the desire to cluster investments.

This paper provides a timely analysis, eight months on from accession, of how it is likely to affect individual, important industrial sectors within the now EU25.

A large portion of labor and trade in most countries is devoted to the service sector, and thus service sector impacts are crucial to a full understanding of the effects of WTO membership. The effect of WTO membership on trade volume has been subject to debate in the past, but critically, these studies have failed to examine service sector trade specifically. Conventional wisdom would seem to suggest that WTO membership should have boosted services trade, particularly after the implementation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 1995. However, the relationship has yet to be rigorously tested. Here, I use data comprising 178 countries across a span ranging from 1995 until 2015 to examine the impact that WTO membership, and specifically WTO accession, has had on service sector trade levels relative to goods trade levels after the adoption of GATS. Statistical tests yield weak evidence for any significant relationship between WTO membership and service sector trade, with some possible exceptions for states that underwent many rounds of negotiations. This exception is explored further through a comparison of the WTO accessions of China and Vietnam. However, even in these extreme cases, it is difficult to find clear evidence of service sector liberalization. Overall, the findings imply that, in almost all cases, WTO rules and accessions have underemphasized service sector trade in favor of agricultural and goods trade, generating lopsided impacts to trade efficiency.

The article analyzes the ‘Europeanization’ of public administration in Estonia with a specific focus on the development of coordination structures. The decentralized approach to European Union-related matters increases the need for well-functioning coordination practices. The authors conclude that the coordination mechanism established for the accession as well as its impact on the broader coordination culture have been successful and can serve as the role model for the rest of public administration. The broader administrative problems yet to be solved include democratic deficit, insufficient engagement of civil society organizations, potential implementation gap between formal regulations and their practice, as well as poor policy analysis which may become particularly problematic after joining the EU.

Iraq has kicked off the procedures to accede to the WTO through the organization’s full working party accession process. In its accession, Iraq is expected to agree to an arduous package of legal and economic reform. Having plunged into the WTO with the belief that accession is its best hope for a prosperous future, Iraq will now face many challenges. Some industries may lose out to competition. Yet liberalizing its market and integrating its economy with the rest of the world will ultimately benefit Iraq because it will stimulate reform and provide trade protections it otherwise would not enjoy. Iraq has made a wise investment by negotiating for WTO membership. Iraq’s accession terms could be rigorous, but they represent not only a cost, but also an investment. WTO membership can be a helpful tool for achieving greater prosperity for Iraq because it encourages progressive domestic policies.

One of the core objectives of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is to maintain a practice of legality, including guaranteeing state and non-state actors interact based on the world trade norms. In seeking to achieve this objective, the WTO aims to uphold the trade rule of law by emphasising compliance with specified rules and procedures during the accession process, dispute settlement and trade policy review. This study aims to review these compliance procedures by invoking the interactional international law concept of a community of legal practice. Second, it briefly illuminates Chad Bown’s proposal to establish an institute for assessing WTO commitments to improve member states’ remit to detect, challenge and deter noncompliance.

This paper is based on Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope’s Interactional Theory of International Law.

There is a strong link between transparency and enforcement in WTO law. The efficacy of the WTO law depends not only on its role in adjudication, but also on facilitating interactional legal practices, within and outside the WTO.

This paper offers an original analysis of the practices of compliance with WTO obligations and illuminates a new proposal for improving compliance. To attract and maintain compliance, the WTO needs to facilitate transparent interactional legal practices for states and non-state actors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the retail store decision criteria of customers in founder member states of the European Union and customers in Central and Eastern European (CEE) accession member states.

Based on the literature review we theorize that significant differences will exist between founder member state customers and CEE accession member customers and that retailers would be wise to forego a standardized retail mix in favour of strategies more precisely adapted to individual national markets. Utilizing a well‐established retail customer decision criteria scale, the authors collected data from 1,221 Eastern and Western EU customers.

It was found that CEE shoppers hold very high expectations of what they desire in a retail store. Indeed, their expectations were higher than those of founder member state customers on 21 of the 22 dimensions measured.

Because of the convenience nature of the data collection method utilized in the current study, future research that examines these two groups might want to employ a more stratified sampling approach across all the countries. Other limitations that provide fertile ground for future studies include specific explorations of the retail decision criteria with more complex measurement scales, which tap each sub construct more thoroughly.

It is apparent that retailers should thoroughly evaluate new target markets, especially when they are distant and unfamiliar and they should pursue country‐adapted strategies when entering the new CEE accession states.

The paper presents some of the first empirical research that examines the diversity of retail preferences across the enlarged EU.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the direction of causality between the monthly stock returns and the monthly net foreign investor flows, and the existence of feedback trading by foreign investors for the “blue chip” stocks of the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE), an emerging stock market.

Monthly net foreign investor flows and stock returns of “blue chip” stocks for the period January 1997‐June 2010 are used. Particularly, taking into account the structural changes in the foreign investor trading activity, the study focuses on the two sub‐periods – before and after the start of European Union (EU) accession negotiations of Turkey. The study uses the bivariate VAR Granger causality approach, impulse response analysis and uses regressions with the vector autoregressive structure and contemporaneous structure (without lag).

Unidirectional Granger causality running from monthly stock returns to monthly net foreign investor flows is detected for the pre‐EU accession negotiations period accompanied by a negative feedback trading effect, but a causality relationship and feedback trading could not be established for the post‐EU accession negotiations period. The relationship is a contemporaneous one rather than a lagged relationship for the latter period.

The studies on the impact of foreign investor flows utilize daily and/or monthly data depending on availability. For the ISE, only monthly full data is available. Further research on the effects of foreign investors in the ISE such as the base broadening and price pressure effects should be undertaken.

The findings are particularly useful for financial managers, portfolio managers, traders, domestic and foreign investors dealing with the ISE.

The article contributes to the limited empirical evidence on the price effects of foreign investor flows in the stock exchanges located in Eastern Europe, Middle East and surrounding countries. The study also considers the significant increase in the amount of foreign investor flows after the start of EU accession negotiations of Turkey and detects a change in the price effect. Unlike the strong empirical evidence of positive feedback trading in the finance literature, negative feedback trading is detected in the ISE, but only for the period before the start of EU accession negotiations. Using monthly data, any feedback trading could not be detected for the period after.

In many relatively small industrial firms—and sometimes even in larger concerns—there comes a time when the boss looks round at the motley collection of books, periodicals, pamphlets, catalogues, etc., which have accumulated more or less haphazardly in various corners and other situations in his office, and says to himself, usually after he has failed to find some particular item of information which he knows is somewhere in the collection, ‘I think I'll put somebody on to looking after this stuff’. He then sends for his typist and says to her, ‘Miss Smith, I want you to look after all the books we have, and all those journals and pamphlets and things that keep coming in’. And so another small special library is born.

Accession to the European Union is one of the most powerful foreign policy tools exercised within the European arena and enlargement negotiations have been a major stimulus to reform in Central and Eastern Europe. Conditionality has evolved as over time into a dynamic instrument used to ensure that new members are sufficiently prepared to take on the responsibilities of EU membership, whilst also satisfying existing member states that new members will not prove too burdensome. This paper aims to examine some of the lessons learnt from the first stage of the Fifth Enlargement and the stricter use of conditionality mechanisms for Romania, Bulgaria and beyond.

The article is based on interviews with EU officials involved in the enlargement process.

The article finds that the use of conditionality in the 2004 enlargement has had a far from uniform effect on candidates and policy areas and that the commission has learnt much from this experience. The integration of Bulgaria and Romania will offer more significant challenges and conditionality has evolved as a mechanism to address these.

The article offersboth an empirical as well as theoretical evaluation of the use of conditionality in the context of the EU enlargement process.