The authors examine the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, they extend the "protection for sale" model to allow for different...

This paper assesses the foreign lobbying forces behind the tariff preferences that the United States grants to Latin American and Caribbean countries. The basic framework is the one developed that is extended to explain the relationship between foreign lobbying and tariff preferences. Results...

This paper investigates the role played by domestic importers and foreign exporters in improving preferential access to the domestic market. To this end, the framework used in this paper extends the protection for sale analysis to explicitly model the role of domestic importers and foreign...

Surveys of export promotion agencies suggest that that they tend to focus on helping firms become exporters as a means to stimulate aggregate export growth. But the existing empirical evidence has paid little attention to the role of export promotion agencies in helping entry into exporting....

This paper estimates the mobility costs of workers across sectors and regions in a large sample of developing countries. The paper develops a new methodology that uses cross-sectional data only. This is motivated by the fact that panel data typically are not available for most developing...

The development of the Internet is often seen as a source of demand for skilled workers and therefore a potential driver of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. This paper focuses on the impact that international trade in online platforms has on the wage gap. Because online trade...

This paper compares the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. It considers the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions, and finds the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller...

The objective of this paper is to explore the impact of Uruguay's privatization and subsequent nationalization of water services on network access and water quality. The results suggest that although the early privatization of water services had little impact on access to the sanitation network,...

This paper explores the extent to which discrimination against foreign applicants in the trademark registration process can be used as a "behind-the-border" barrier to imports. Prima-facie evidence shows that in some developing countries the ratio of trademark registration to applications is...

The main objective of this paper is to provide estimates of the cost of moving out of subsistence for Madagascar's farmers. The analysis is based on a simple asset-return model of occupational choice. Estimates suggest that the entry (sunk) cost associated with moving out of subsistence can be...