The world's two largest economies, the United States and China, are locked in a trade war, complicating policy choices internationally. These choices are sharper for the countries of East and Southeast Asia than they are elsewhere, because the multilateral rules-based economic order on which...

We construct a new global commodity-level export dataset to analyze the persistence of export patterns as proxies of productive capabilities across the first and the current waves of globalization. We find that productive capabilities are path-dependent and historical capabilities are powerful...

Does what you exported matter? We build a new global commodity-level export database for the previous era of globalization and find persistence in productive capabilities proxied by economic complexity, export diversification, and sophistication across a century. We also show that productive...

The incomes of unskilled workers in Dakar under colonial rule was comparable to those of their counterparts elsewhere in West Africa. Real urban wages grew during the Great Depression and the 'Ëœdevelopmental decade' following World War II, though accounting properly for housing costs results...

East Asia's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) came into force in 2022 as the world's largest free trade agreement. RCEP was concluded, signed and brought into force in the face of major international uncertainty and is a significant boost to the global trading system. RCEP...