Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed...

This paper uses detailed data on bound and applied tariffs to assess the consequences of the World Trade Organization s December 2008 Modalities for tariffs levied and faced by developing countries, and the welfare implications of these reforms. The authors find that the tiered formula for...

Many trade negotiations involve large cuts in high tariffs, while allowing smaller cuts for an agreed share of politically sensitive products. The effects of these flexibilities on market access opportunities are difficult to predict, creating particular problems for developing countries in...

In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic...

Many trade negotiations involve large cuts in high tariffs, while allowing smaller cuts for an agreed share of politically sensitive products. The effects of these flexibilities on market access opportunities are difficult to predict, creating particular problems for developing countries in...

We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is only required to be upper semicontinuous in the control variable. We apply...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse efficiency and welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse efficiency and welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public...

The paper addresses the issue of the feasible level of private finance in a contracting model of infrastructure finding and financing. It characterizes the structure of financial contracts, deriving the conditions under which both public and private finance coexist. A key feature is that access...