There is a large body of research that explores international trade as a source of the dispersion in income levels and growth performances across countries. The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950 and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of international trade....

This edition of Global Trade Watch addresses three questions concerning recent trade developments: What is happening? Why? Does it matter? 2016 is the fifth consecutive year of sluggish trade growth and the year with the weakest trade performance since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial...

This report summarizes the measures of contingent protection regulated by the WTO and their purposes. They can be divided into two categories. The first one regards temporary provisions that can be used when a predefined set of circumstances legitimize temporary increases in import barriers. The...

This module illustrates the basics of trade policy analysis. It focuses on the following questions: 1) What do countries gain by trading with each other instead of opting for self sufficiency?; 2) What are the main instruments of trade policy?; 3) How do they affect prices, output and welfare?;...

This module takes a bird eye view of the historical pattern of globalization, with special reference to trade flows and it examines the role played by Russia in this process. The module starts by describing the historical waves of globalization since 1870s and the latest patterns in the process...

Recent work on China's accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade at the time of accession...

This paper exploits information from two different datasets to provide a novel and multi-dimensional picture of the engagement of all sub-Saharan African countries in global value chains (GVCs). It documents in detail the nature of the underlying data and the way it is used to construct several...

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in fossil fuel exporters at different horizons. The main argument is that central banks in these economies need to look beyond the horizon of the business cycle. In the short run, (independent) monetary policy should flexibly target inflation. In...

Cambodia has recorded both rapid economic growth and macroeconomic stability in recent decades despite (or thanks to) high levels of dollarization. Previous studies on dollarization in Cambodia have largely focused on examining its causes and estimating seigniorage losses. As an attempt to...