This edition of Global Trade Watch addresses three questions concerning recent trade developments: What is happening? Why? Does it matter? 2016 is the fifth consecutive year of sluggish trade growth and the year with the weakest trade performance since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial...

There is a large body of research that explores international trade as a source of the dispersion in income levels and growth performances across countries. The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950 and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of international trade....

This paper exploits information from two different datasets to provide a novel and multi-dimensional picture of the engagement of all sub-Saharan African countries in global value chains (GVCs). It documents in detail the nature of the underlying data and the way it is used to construct several...

In the mid-2000s, the production of hearing aids shifted almost entirely to 3D printing. Using difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods, this paper examines the effects of this shift on trade flows. The analysis finds that trade increased roughly 60 percent following the...

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,...