After a half century of overtly inward-oriented policies, Brazil finally moved to open its trade regime in the early 1990s. Being one the last countries to make this move in a region that notoriously lagged behind East Asia, Brazil was quick to implement a comprehensive trade liberalization...

This paper explores several mechanisms by which the barriers imposed by rules of origin may be reduced through effective trade facilitation efforts. Also discussed are the functional similarities of a variety of other requirements on international trade with rules of origin, including...

This paper maps out Rules of Origin (RoO) in regional trade agreements (RTAs) around the world, and observes that the restrictiveness and complexity of RoO are driven by factors specific to each RTA, including economy size and level of development. Given the powerful political economy forces...

Recent calls for reform of the rules of origin in preferential trade arrangements such as the GSP as well as in many free trade agreements between developed and developing countries have focused almost exclusively on the need to relax the requirements of these rules. Without fundamentally...

Do quality at entry assessments enhance the delivery of development projects? In this paper we take advantage of approval and execution systems in place at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to examine whether projects that have higher quality at entry-captured through grading scores...

This study analyzes mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic for eight large Latin American cities. Indicators of mobility by socioeconomic status (SES) are generated by combining georeferenced mobile phone information with granular census data. Before the pandemic, a strong positive...

This paper analyzes extractive industries in Colombia and their connections to other economic activities in the country. We use detailed social security data on all formal employees to create an industry-relatedness measure using labor flows between industries. Drawing on the vast network...

The current coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented public health challenge that has devastating economic impacts for households. Using a sample of 230,540 respondents to online surveys in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we show that the economic impacts are large and unequal:...