International comparisons of living standards are still primarily made using GDP per capita, in spite of recurrent criticism that this is a partial and ill-founded measure of social welfare (Sen). Alternative measures abound, such as the Index of Human Development computed by the United Nations...

Le premier objectif de l'etude est de mettre en evidence les reseaux regionaux du commerce international, en mesurant la "proximite commerciale" entre les pays. Les coefficients d'intensite relatives bilaterales des echanges permettent une telle mesure. Ils comparent chaqueflux bilateral observe...

This paper is the first to use the Banque de France database on firm-level exports and imports of services. We first show that firms trading services are bigger, more productive and pay higher wages than the purely domestic ones. Second, exports are very concentrated among a few numbers of...

This paper documents the construction of BACI, our international trade database, which covers more than 200 countries and 5,000 products, between 1994 and 2007. New approaches have been developed to reconcile data reported by almost 150 countries to the United Nations Statistics Division,...