Current U.S. trade policy stresses establishing free trade areas (FTAs) with partners spanning the globe. Motivations include enhancing goods and services trade; stimulating investment flows; extending standards on intellectual property rights, labor, and the environment; and addressing...

This paper provides a framework for understanding trade patterns in the Mashreq. An augmented gravity model is used to compare actual with expected levels of trade. Trade barriers, political uncertainty, and over-appreciation of domestic currencies seem to explain low levels of international...

This paper estimates a gravity model to address the issue of whether intra-Arab trade is too little. Although gravity models have been extensively used to measure bilateral trade among countries, they have—to the best of our knowledge—never been used to measure intra-Arab trade. Our results...

This paper explores and quantifies several aspects of the performance of currency unions using an augmented version of the gravity model and focusing on two samples, the world and Africa. Our empirical findings suggest that, in principle, membership in a currency union should benefit Africa as...

This paper studies the effect of instrumental and institutional stabilization of exchange rate volatility on the integration of goods markets. Rather than using data on volume of trade, this paper employs a 3-dimensional panel of prices of 95 very disaggregated goods (e.g., light bulbs) in 83...

This paper finds that the estimates of Armington elasticities (the elasticity of substitution between groups of products identified by country of origin) obtained from multilateral trade data can differ from those obtained from bilateral trade data. In particular, the former tends to be higher...

Growth takeoffs in developing economies have rebounded in the past two decades. Although recent takeoffs have lasted longer than takeoffs before the 1990s, a key question is whether they could unravel like some did in the past. This paper finds that recent takeoffs are associated with stronger...

Over the past decade, China’s growth model has become more reliant on investment and its footprint in global imports has widened substantially. Several economies within China’s supply chain are increasingly exposed to its investment-led growth and face growing risks from a...

This paper investigates the role played by emerging Asia in the emergence and evolution of the global trade imbalances. Based on simulations in a general equilibrium model of the world economy, we find that a productivity slowdown in the non-tradable sector of these economies in the second half...

This paper investigates the asymmetries in trade spillovers from sector-specific technology shocks in China to selected euro area countries. We use a Ricardian-gravity trade model to estimate sectoral competitiveness in individual euro area countries. Simulations on the impact of productivity...