Rapid growth among the major emerging markets over the past 20 years has boosted global demand for commodities. The seven largest emerging markets accounted for almost all the increase in global consumption of metals, and two-thirds of the increase in energy consumption over this period. As...

This paper assesses the international comovement of gross capital inflows and outflows using a two-level factor model. Among advanced and emerging countries, capital flows exhibit strong commonality: common (global and country group-specific) factors account, on average, for close to half of...

The regional books that provided detailed estimates of distortion in developing economies are all country focused. While they include commodity details for their particular country, they are not able to provide an overview for developing countries or high-income countries as a group, or for the...

The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global gross domestic product contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global...

The paper offers an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). It outlines a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and it traces the implications of these alternative conceptualizations for the...

This paper uses data on directional trade flows and Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) to i) estimate the effects of RTA on trade flows and ii) assess the importance of Global Value Chains for these effects. Based on a Difference-in- Difference identification strategy, we find that RTAs are...

The global economy has witnessed a decline in inflation and an increase in inflation synchronization since the early 1980s. This paper investigates the relationship between inflation synchronization and trade integration, and documents the strong link between inflation co-movement and Global...

This paper provides up-to-date characterization of the association between trade and GDP comovement - also called the trade comovement slope- for 150 countries from 1962 to 2011. The paper shows that trade is significantly linked to more GDP correlation, either directly through bilateral trade,...

For decades, manufacturers around the world have outsourced production to countries with lower labor costs. However, there is a concern that robotization in high-income countries will challenge this shifting international division of labor known as the "flying geese" paradigm. Greenfield foreign...

This paper assesses the international comovement of gross capital flows in a setting simultaneously encompassing aggregate inflows and outflows. It uses as empirical framework a multilevel latent factor model, implemented on flow data for a large sample of countries over more than three decades....