An increasing number of regional trade agreements contains provisions that ease access to visas among member countries, which reduces the administrative cost of crossing the border. Combining United Nations data on bilateral stocks of immigrants in the period 1990-2020 with World Bank data on...

This paper studies the effect of regional trade agreements on firms' exports. Using detailed information on the content of trade agreements and firm-level exports for 31 developing countries between 2000 and 2020, the analysis shows that the depth of trade agreements matters for the export...

Africa's share of global exports has dropped by 50 percent over the last three decades. To stem this decline, aid for trade to the region has increased rapidly in recent years. Assistance can target improvements in three important components of trade facilitation: transit times, documentation,...

Africa's share of global exports has dropped by 50 percent over the last three decades. To stem this decline, aid for trade to the region has increased rapidly in recent years. Assistance can target improvements in three important components of trade facilitation: transit times, documentation,...

This paper explores the economic impacts of preferential trade agreements, conditional on their level of ambition. It clusters 278 agreements, encompassing 910 provisions over 18 policy areas and estimates the trade elasticity for the different clusters. These elasticities are used in a series...

Using a cross-section of more than 29,000 manufacturing firms in 64 developing and emerging countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses whether trading firms have a female labor share premium relative to non-trading firms. It focuses on four types of trading firms:...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...

This paper presents new data on the content of preferential trade agreements. The data contain detailed information on the 18 policy areas most frequently covered in preferential trade agreements, focusing on the stated objectives, substantive commitments, and other aspects such as transparency,...

This paper presents new high-frequency data on trade policy changes targeting medical and food products since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, documenting how countries used trade policy instruments in response to the health crisis on a week-by-week basis. The data set reveals a rapid...

World trade is increasingly ruled by preferential trade agreements (PTAs), but their precise nature remains relatively opaque. This paper assesses a central dimension of these agreements, the significance of tariff preferences, using a new data set on preferential and non-preferential or Most...