We compare the general tax provisions and investment incentives in the Philippines to six other east-Asian economies-Malaysia, Indonesia, Lao, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. We calculate effective tax rates and find that general effective tax rates are relatively high in the Philippines, while...

The establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) at end-2015 has brought into sharp focus the issue of financial and economic integration in the region. This paper takes stock of ASEAN’s financial integration and prospects. ASEAN integration could accelerate in the years ahead; it...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. BACKGROUND -- III. OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE -- IV. SIMULATION OF THE FISCAL REVENUE IMPACT OF TARIFF LIBERALIZATION -- V. SUMMARY AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS -- REFERENCES.

Trade barriers and poor infrastructure play an important role in limiting trade integration in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Closing half of the infrastructure gap between LAC and advanced economies could lift exports by 30 percent. Reducing import tariffs could boost LAC's trade, but...

Available data show a marked increase in subsidy utilization in China and in other major economies between 2009 and 2022. In this paper, we investigate the effects that China's subsidies have on international trade flows at the product level over this period. The results indicate that the...

This paper examines the mechanisms through which output volatility is related to trade openness using an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. The main results are threefold. First, sectors more open to international trade are more volatile. Second, trade is...

We estimate the macroeconomic effects of import tariffs and trade policy uncertainty in the United States, combining theory-consistent and narrative sign restrictions in Bayesian SVARs. We find mostly adverse consequences of protectionism, in aggregate and across sectors and regions. Tariff...

We study the effects of services trade reforms in a multi-country multi-sector quantitative trade model with input-output linkages. We find that (i) welfare gains from substantial services trade liberalization are large, around 3 percent on average; (ii) gains are larger by 0.7 percentage points...

Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good—for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we...

Do growth spells in Africa end because of bad realizations of the same factors that influence growth spells in the rest of the world, or because of different factors altogether? To answer this question, we examine determinants of growth spells in Africa and the rest of the world using Bayesian...