Empirical studies on international trade extensively rely on the use of mirror trade statistics, i.e data reported by trading partners. However, while extensive reviews have been done on how to use mirror data to compensate poor quality data or to proxy transportation costs, very few has been...

Newly collected data in UNCTAD’s Trade Analysis and Information System (TRAINS) database on non-tariff measures (NTMs) offers the possibility to assess its impact on trade. The approach chosen is using a frequency count, which is the number of NTM on a single product. This novel method can be...

Motivations for foreign direct investment (FDI) could be multiple. This paper conducts a general examination of the influence of market access conditions on FDI decisions using a unique data set on bilateral FDI outward stocks and novel measures of market access. We find that over the period...

Agriculture plays a fundamental role in the development prospects of many developing countries, especially those at the lower end of the development process for which export earnings are largely related to the export performance of their agricultural sector. Although the last few decades have...

This paper presents a unique database reporting the shortest liner shipping routes between any pair of countries for a reference sample of 178 countries over the 2006–2012 period. Computed maritime distances are retrieved using an original database containing all existing direct liner shipping...

It has been long recognized that in the presence of market power, positive import tariffs can be optimal. The rationale is that higher tariffs reduce import demand, which in the presence of inelastic export supply from the rest of the world allows the importing country to increase its terms of...

Insights from a novel Trade-and-Employment theoretical framework are used to assess the relationship between openness to trade and unemployment. The impact of trade on unemployment depends on the covariance between comparative advantage and sector level labour market frictions. If the covariance...

An important literature has shown that the relationship between economic diversification and income per capita is non-monotonic (Imbs and Wacziarg, 2003 and Koren and Tenreyro, 2007). At early stages of development countries diversify as income increases and new economic opportunities emerge,...

Motivated by the standard Heckscher-Ohlin theory, we investigate whether comparative advantage affects the duration of exports from least developed countries (LDCs). To do so, we first calculate each exported product’s distance from the country’s comparative advantage. Then we estimate a...

The exchange rate plays an important role in a country’s trade performance. Whether determined by exogenous shocks or by policy, the relative valuations of currencies and their volatility often have important repercussions on international trade, the balance of payments and overall economic...