Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease the financing constraints of host country firms. But if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, foreign direct investment...

The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low-income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from...

The authors link industry-level data on trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from the Current Population Surveys. They find that occupational exposure to globalization is associated with larger wage effects than industry exposure. This effect has been overlooked because it...

The author's model demonstrates that when imports are predominantly intermediate inputs - as they are in most developing countries - import restrictions can not always be relied upon to improve the trade balance. Such restrictions act as a supply shock to the economy. Unless nontraded goods are...

During the 1980s the Bank aggressively promoted greater uniformity in tariffs in developing countries. The Bank's structural adjustment and trade reform programs have often recommended abolition of quantitative import restrictions and increased uniformity in tariffs. This report is a formal...

The authors develop a simple, formal framework for clarifying the tradeoffs involved in choosing between a fixed and flexible exchange rate system. They apply this framework to the countries of Africa's CFA Zone, which have maintained fixed parity with the French franc since independence....

In this paper, the authors discuss the possibility that the North and South may have differing technological needs. Just as the North would like to develop drugs against cancer and heart disease, and the South drugs against tropical disease, so the North's labor saving innovations are less...

Regional integration is on the rise again, despite its apparent failure among developing countries in the past. The authors survey the ambiguous economies of customs unions, emphasizing that the traditional dichotomy between"trade creation"and"trade diversion"is not particularly helpful for...