The Kalman Filter is used to estimate a structural time-series model of cotton supply for 30 countries and 16 aggregated regions. Estimated short run supply elasticities with respect to the world price are presented for all 46 countries and regions. While they are broadly within the expected...

This paper shows that longer trade times are associated with higher levels of trade-related corruption, consistent with a theoretical framework in which “fast” producers earn higher profits than “slow” ones, but may have to pay “speed money” to possibly corrupt customs officials....

This study aims at assessing the link between a more liberal air cargo regime and increased bilateral merchandise trade in the Asia Pacific region, under the auspices of APEC. Using the gravity model and employing the Air Liberalisation Index (ALI) developed by the WTO Secretariat, this paper...

This paper uses a new methodology to provide some first evidence on the overall level of trade costs in APEC and ASEAN. On average, APEC member economies have met the Shanghai target of a 5% reduction in trade costs over five years, but only just. Performance of individual member economies...

• Available evidence strongly suggests that cotton producers in West Africa are relatively unresponsive to changes in world prices. This means they are poorly placed to take advantage of improved market conditions that might result from the reduction or abolition of cotton subsidies in rich...

We present a new dataset of international trade costs in services sectors. Using a theory-based methodology combined with data on domestic shipments and cross-border trade, we find that trade costs in services are much higher than in goods sectors: a multiple of two to three times in many cases....

This paper shows that the Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimator applied to the gravity model produces estimates in which, summing across all partners, actual and estimated total trade flows are identical. Other methods such as OLS do not have this desirable property. Indeed, Poisson is the...

Regulatory measures constitute a significant barrier to cross-border services trade in sectors including transport, communications, business services, insurance, and recreation. However, regulation has weaker effects on trade in financial services, distribution, and construction. Entry barriers...

This note presents a simple generalization of the adaptive expectations mechanism in which the learning parameter is time variant. It is shown that expectations generated in this way are rational in the sense of producing minimum mean squared forecast errors for a broad class of time series...

This paper uses a novel dataset on US food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country’s own history of compliance in relation to a particular product. The...