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Our research is about the trade in material goods from Asia to Europe over this period, and its impact on Europe’s consumer and industrial cultures. It entails a comparative study of Europe’s East India Companies and the private trade from Asia over the period. The commodities trade was heavily dependent on private trade. The historiography to date has left a blind spot in this area, concentrating instead on corruption and malfeasance. Taking a global history approach we investigate the trade in specific consumer goods in many qualities and varieties that linked merchant communities and stimulated information flows. We set out how private trade functioned alongside and in connection with the various European East India companies; we investigate how this changed over time, how it drew on the Company infrastructure, and how it took the risks and developed new and niche markets for specific Asian commodities that the Companies could not sustain.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the impacts that the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards is having in the trade of agricultural products from developing countries.

In a first stage industry experts in the Chilean fresh fruit trading industry were interviewed to understand the perceived impact that private standards are imposing in the industry. These interviews allowed to identify the market case study, table grapes, the landscape of private standards and their prevalence in different countries. In a second stage, a gravity trade model for trade in table grapes was estimated, with a focus on the more stringent countries identified by experts in the first stage.

We show evidence that the proliferation of private standards required by large European retailers has diverted trade away from more stringent countries that require more certifications (and into less stringent European markets). We also show that the costs of these additional certifications have been shared by trading partners, via an increase in direct sales, as opposed to consignment (the traditional marketing mode), which is associated with higher prices.

The impacts of the recent proliferation of private and overlapping standards in international trade needs to be better understood both by the legal and economic literature. While the use of private standards has been growing since the 1990s, there is a recent trend of large European retailers imposing their own and overlapping standards that needs to be better understood to inform policy.

While there is a thin literature on the impact of private standards on trade, most of this has studied the effects of the now de facto mandatory GlobalGAP certification. However, there is a recent trend by large European retailers of demanding their own private certifications, together with other already existing overlapping private standards. This study describes and analyzes the impacts of this rather new trend.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this paper is to test the effect of informal finance and trade credit on the performance of private firms.

Based on a survey to private firms in 19 cities, the paper empirically tests the promoting effects of informal finance and trade credit on the performance of private firms in China.

It was found that informal finance and trade credit have positive effects on private firms' performance measured by ROA. The net income reinvestment rate of private firms is positively related to whether or not the firm adopts informal financing or trade credit financing. A private firm having limited access to formal finance is more inclined to rely on self‐funds and is more limited by financing choices. Informal financing and trade credit can relieve the tension of cash flow chain but cannot solve the financing constraints. The empirical results also show that bank credit is still not the main financing choice for private firms and has not yet played a promoting role in private firms' performance and growth. Informal finance is more important to promote performance in manufacturing industry, while trade credit is more effective in wholesale and trading industry. The results show the coexistence viability of informal financing channels and formal financial institutions in China.

The policy implication is the Chinese Government should take careful steps to regulate informal financing sources.

After some theoretical literature, such as Lin and Sun, this paper explores for the first time the effect of informal financing channels on the performance of private firms.

The notion of sustainable development, which appears to have become a permanent fixture in political and economic discussions at the national and international level, carries with it approvals of various sorts. At a time when the sheer number of human beings on the planet is ecologically problematic, sustainable development has replaced motherhood as that which everyone unreservedly commends. The different foundations upon which approval rests successfully blanket sustainable development with an all encompassing positive assessment. Positively assessed economically, politically, ecologically and purportedly topped off with moral support from human rights and justice considerations, sustainable development has attained the status of an unquestioned good. Frequently it is touted as the highest good. The means to achieving sustainable development globally and how to contribute to it nationally are seriously debated worldwide. While courses of action plotted to secure the end may rest in pages of committee reports or be poorly implemented, the few voices raised against the recommendation to pursue it are scarcely discernable as a murmur in the cacophony of those who sing its praises. Consequently, when the support from economic, political, ecological and moral theories combines with “the people's” commitment to sustainable development, this notion functions to identify today's most powerful justification for the actions or omissions of governments, individually or jointly.

This study aims to examine the effects of investor protection (PROT), internal and external corporate governance (CG) on private information-based trading (PIBT).

This study uses a sample of 3,438 firms from 42 countries for the period 2002–2015 to examine the effects of the broad and specific measures of PROT, internal CG and external CG (product market competition and block ownership [BOWN]) on a more accurate measure of PIBT using regression analysis.

The results show that PROT and BOWN are effective in reducing PIBT. However, the specific measure of PROT (strength of PROT) is not significant in emerging markets and civil law countries. The internal CG is also significant but has a positive effect on PIBT.

The results suggest that PROT law matters in the efforts to prevent PIBT. Policymakers and securities market regulators, particularly in emerging markets and civil law countries, should focus more on refining existing securities laws and enacting detailed securities rules that explicitly prevent specific market manipulation and PIBT.

This study provides evidence for the importance of specific and detailed securities rules in different market and legal environments. Furthermore, this study uses the segregated private information-based speculative trading component to accurately measure the PIBT.

This research studies private information from extreme price movements or jumps. The authors calculate the private information using a reduced form model from the stochastic volatility jump process and use several statistical robustness tests as well as several frequencies to improve our consistency. This study reveals that private information is significant in explain the existence of jumps in capital markets in Southeast Asia, whereas macroeconomic events cannot explain them. The authors determine empirically that private information in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia are not persistent and its value gradually decreases when we use the lower frequency. Based on the Fama–Macbeth regression, this study shows that private information in the capital market has a strong positive relationship with individual returns in Indonesia’s capital market and Thailand’s capital market for all frequencies.

Private standards are increasingly governing international food trade, but little is known about the implications for developing countries. The objective of the study is to provide evidence in the ongoing debate on standards as barrier or catalyst for developing countries’ export. We use the Peruvian fresh asparagus export sector as a case study and provide empirical panel data evidence on the effects of certification to private food standards on export volumes of firms. Our dataset on the transactions of 567 export firms from 1993 to 2011 allows us to take export dynamics and time trends into account, as well as to keep country and sector specific effects constant. In our empirical strategy, we first use simple OLS and ignore firm-specific unobservable effects and dynamic export patterns. We then account for export persistence, as well as company fixed effects and finally, use System-GMM estimators to address potential reversed causality issues. These approaches represent substantial methodological improvements compared with previous studies on the trade effects of private standards. The empirical innovation is crucial for accurate impact estimation, as results indicate that certification to standards has a positive effect on the export volumes of companies, but that the significant effect dwindles as soon as unobserved firm heterogeneity and export persistency are properly controlled for. Additional studies with large data availabilities are needed to further disentangle the effect and confirm the case study results.

This paper uses the case of the English East India Company to consider the impact of colonialization on patterns of trade. The East India Company went through a commercial and a colonial period in Asia and therefore provides a rare case in which fixed national effects are held constant while the degree of colonialism varies. We use this variation to consider the impact of colonial institutions on the degree of concentration in overseas trade. We find that the onset of colonialism is linked to increasing inequality in the distribution of traffic across ports. This finding is significant because of the relationship between overseas trade and the potential for long-term economic development: the development trajectories of the individual ports were likely to have been affected by these different rates of trade. Our findings also highlight how the negotiation between political and commercial goals in early modern trade and imperialism produced different macro-structural outcomes for global trade patterns.