Employment effects of the recent global economic crisis have differed significantly across countries. An active public debate currently focuses on external shocks and the role of labor market policies as a driver of those differences. In this note, the authors analyze the roles of integration...

This paper is designed to help both the beneficiary governments and donors of aid-for-trade identify countries that are under-performing in trade and which are receiving less aid for trade than their global performance might otherwise suggest is necessary. The authors develop ten measures of...

This paper shows that the institutional environment and the ability to export on time are sources of comparative advantage as important as factors of production. In particular, the ability to export on time is crucial to explain comparative advantage in intermediate goods. These findings...

The paper assesses the impact of fiscal spillovers on growth in the context of a coordinated exit from crisis management policies. We find that despite potentially sizeable domestic effects from consolidation, aggregate negative spillovers to other countries are likely to be contained in...

Nearly two years after the onset of the financial crises, many central banks have brought their policy interest rates down to, or close to zero. Various governments have seen their budget deficits soar. Both policies have affected exchange rates, partly through market expectations. With a...

We analyze the impact of the EU unilateral trade preferences on both the intensive and the extensive margin of trade. Using a tobit and probit estimation we find that the impact of unilateral trade preferences on both margins is strictly linked to the sector under analysis and to the type of...

Using micro-aggregated firm information for nine Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and data from input-output tables, we examine the role of Global Value Chains (GVCs) for technology diffusion across EU countries. Our empirical results provide support for a two-stage diffusion process...