The paper evaluates the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) within the global structure of overlapping regional trade agreements (RTAs) using a modified gravity equation. First, it examines the effects of the Trade Liberalization Program which started in 2006. SAFTA would have a minor effect...

Madagascar plans to start phasing out its customs tariffs on imports from the Southern African Development Community in 2007. This paper uses a CGE model to evaluate the impact of the SADC FTA on Madagascar economy. The results suggest that the SADC FTA would only have a limited impact on...

What role does China play in Africa's development? What drives China's increasing economic involvement in the continent? This paper attempts to provide a quantified assessment of China's multifaceted influence as market, donor, financer and investor, and contractor and builder. Though in the...

Although Europe in the aggregate is a not a major contributor to global current account imbalances, its trade and financial linkages with the rest of the world mean that it will still be affected by a shift in the current configuration of external deficits and surpluses. We assess the...

The paper provides quantitative estimates of the impact of the European trade agreements on trade flows. It applies both static and dynamic panel estimation techniques. The results are useful to policymakers because new intra-European trade agreements are being negotiated. In the absence of a...

This paper uses disaggregated trade data to assess how the expansion of China's production capacity and its changing production structure may be affecting its trade linkages with other countries. It finds that China is moving away from traditional assembly operations in its processing activities...

China's sectoral trade composition, product quality mix, and import content of processing exports have all changed substantially during the past decade. This has rendered trade elasticities estimated using aggregate data highly unstable, with more recent data pointing to significantly higher...