Financial development plays an important role in the structure of the trade balance and promoting economic development. Trade literature suggests that differences in economies’ endowments of labour, land, physical capital and technology explain the dynamics and patterns of international trade...

This working paper introduces the concept of Trade in Value Added (TiVA) and presents an initial analysis of TiVA for selected regional ESCAP economies. The paper introduces Global Value Chains (GVCs) and issues for the measurement of trade statistics due to proliferation of GVCs. It further...

This study estimates the effect of trade facilitation measures implementation on trade costs in Asia and the Pacific using data from the United Nations Global Survey on Trade Facilitation and Paperless Trade Implementation. Impact of different sets of measures are considered, from a basic set of...

The proliferation of RTAs is a central feature of the world trade policy environment in the last 20 years. This paper provides an empirical study of the extent to which the formation of RTAs has changed the distribution of world goods trade among trading partners. To do this, it constructs a new...

The governance of international trade incurs major costs, including to the environment. Global supply chains are complex, and traditionally involve the printing, dispatching, processing, exchanging, and ultimately discarding of vast quantities of paper documents. Trade facilitation, and...

Trade misinvoicing occurs when price, quantity or description of internationally traded goods is purposefully misrepresented for pecuniary gain. It is one type of illicit financial flows (IFFs), and combating IFFs has been explicitly included in the Sustainable Development Goals. Most literature...