The decade from 1985 to 1995 was an unprecedented period of declining barriers to global trade. The reform wave was especially pronounced in developing countries where overvalued currencies were eliminated, quantitative import restrictions dismantled, and import tariffs reduced. What accounts...

Writings on the macroeconomic impact of capital account liberalization find few, if any, robust effects of liberalization on real variables. In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, I argue that the textbook theory of liberalization holds up quite well to a critical reading of this literature. The...

Despite several theoretical contributions and considerable informal empirical evidence" to the contrary, a notion that trade and investment are substitutes persists in trade policy" analysis. This paper considers the liberalization of commodity trade versus liberalization" allowing direct...

This paper focuses on three unresolved issues with regard to the impact of trade reform. First, many studies linking trade reform to long run growth are surprisingly fragile. To illustrate the problems with this literature, we examine a popular measure of openness recently introduced by Sachs...

There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

The magnitude of existing research on the effects of trade reform is impressive. Yet economists have not reached a clear consensus on a number of important questions such as the labor market impact of trade reform, the linkages between trade and foreign direct investment, and the relationship...

What are the potential benefits from establishing international rules for the conduct of trade policy and how should these rules be designed? These questions are of central importance to the evolution of national trade policies in the post-war era, a period in which an elaborate system of...