Carbon accounting and labeling for products are new instruments of supply chain management that may affect developing country export opportunities. Most instruments in use today are private business management tools, although the underlying science and methodologies may spread to issues subject...

Services play a broad and strategic role in the economy. The new focus in services arises because they have become increasingly tradable, allowing for the emergence of new and improved export activities. Trade in services, particularly business services, has become a dynamic component of trade...

Recent events have rekindled interest in the role of primary commodities in development. Was the boom in commodity prices from around 2003 through 2008 just a cyclical event, or does it suggests that prices have entered on a period of secular strength, driven by factors such as demand in big,...

Climate change policies and trade policy are on a collision course. Border tax adjustments are at the center of the debate and are being considered in many Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, notably the United States and the European Union (EU). They will...

Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) can serve as a powerful tool to inform prevailing public financial management (PFM) practices and the extent to which government budgets link to execution and desired service delivery objectives and beneficiaries. Since the first PETS in Uganda in 1996,...

Many of the major economies in the multilateral, rules-based trading system find themselves in a situation in which their applied tariff rates are quite close to the tariff binding levels that form their legal commitments at the World Trade Organization (WTO). This implies that they cannot...

Informality is pervasive in many developing countries, where the majority of businesses do not register. One view, linked strongly with Hernando de Soto and the International Finance Corporations (IFC's) doing business project, is that the informal sector consists of potential entrepreneurs who...

Expanding international trade is an important avenue for growth and development in low-income countries. In addition to increasing the quantity of existing export flows, many countries seek to diversify into production and export activities that provide a higher return to the labor and capital...

A recent paper has highlighted some close correspondences between economic performance during the present world recession and that during the early months of the great depression that began in late 1929. World industrial production from April 2008 to April 2009 fell as rapidly as during the...

The world is facing the most severe global economic crisis since the great depression of the 1930s. For the first time since World War two, World Bank projections for annual economic growth show that world gross domestic product (GDP) will decline 2.9 percent in 2009 and growth in developing...