The United States (U.S.) recession could hurt the South, particularly in oil and apparel exports, and Latin America and the Caribbean. But South-South trade is partly picking up the slack. Middle-income countries are driving export diversification of low-income countries. Developing countries...

The authors identifies a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that they hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, they decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and...

Production networks have been at the heart of the recent growth in trade among East Asian countries. Fragmentation trade, reflected mainly in the trade in parts and components, is expanding more rapidly than the conventional trade in final goods. This is mainly due to the relatively more...

This book deals with financial liberalization issues in the context of trade negotiations. The liberalization of trade and investment in financial services is only a subset of the broader financial liberalization agenda. The purpose of trade and investment liberalization is to increase financial...

Development economists are paid to look into the future. They ask not only how things work today, but also how a new policy, program, or project will make them work tomorrow. They view the world and history as a learning process, past and present are just inputs into thinking about what's...

To this day, policy makers, policy advisers, and economists in development institutions do not have any practical tools to help them to assess the impacts of policies aimed at promoting gender equality and quantify the effect of these policies on growth. Yet, there has been limited effort in...

An abundance of natural resources is intuitively expected to be a blessing. Nonetheless, it has been argued for some decades that large endowments of natural resources oil, gas, and minerals in particular may actually become more of a curse, often leading to slow economic growth and...

This note examines one of the most fundamental questions to emerge from the Great Recession of 2007-9: how to regrow global economic growth going forward? Although all are painfully aware that it may be 2013 or 2014 before the global economy returns to normalcy, no one is sanguine about medium-...

The Asian style of regional integration may be seen as a 'quasi-common economy' that eschews a formal linkup in political or monetary terms, but manages to generate similar results by strong physical integration and distributed chains of production and service delivery. This note proposes the...