Evidence from Mercosur suggests that eliminating duty drawbacks for intra-regional exports would lead to increased counterlobbying against protection of intermediate products. Without the duty drawback, the common external tariff would have been an estimated 3.5 percentage points (25 percent)...

"Professional skills are scarce in Mozambique, even by the standards of low-income countries. The solution, however, is not necessarily to create more Mozambican training institutions but to address market-specific problems. Where skills are already the binding constraint (for example, in...

"Using tariffs as a measure of openness, the authors find consistent evidence that the conditional effects of trade liberalization on inequality are correlated with relative factor endowments. Trade liberalization is associated with increases in inequality in countries well-endowed in highly...

During a period of trade liberalization (1985-89), when Mexican manufacturing experienced an important inflow of foreign direct investment, manufacturing sectors with heavy foreign direct investment received greater protection in import-competing sectors. With the move toward greater openness,...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has created a more secure environment for trade in services, but it has not created the negotiating momentum to reduce protection or the rules to ensure that protection takes a considerable form. In dealing with the trade-impeding impact of...

"Over the past two decades, globalization, and more specifically the increased exposure to competition from low-price producers in China and India, has created a new economic environment for other emerging economies. The most advantageous way for manufacturing firms in those economies to...

"During the 1990s, foreign direct investment in producer service sectors in Latin America was massive. Such investment may increase the quality of services, reduce their cost, and offer opportunities for knowledge spillovers to downstream users of the services. This paper examines the effects of...

"The international diffusion of technology presents an opportunity for developing economies distant from the world technological frontier to reduce their income gap relative to advanced economies. It is therefore crucial to understand why, when faced with similar technological alternatives...

"The author studies the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) for manufacturing firms in Bangladesh using data from a recent survey. She obtains TFP measures by making use of firm-specific deflators for output and inputs. Controlling for industry, location, and year fixed effects, she...