Product standards and technical regulations are critical to industrial performance and global trade. Reform of national standards, testing, and product certification regimes represents an important new area for international debate. Government agreements to eliminate overlapping certification...

Japan faces significant challenges in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship. Attempts to formally model past industrial policy interventions uniformly uncover little, if any, positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare. The evidence indicates that most resource flows went to large,...

After the recent IT bubble, Germany alone among OECD countries is beginning to share Japan's political-economic profile: too many banks with too little capital, macroeconomic policy division and deflationary bias, and financially and politically passive households. Germany has been spared...

South Korea's experience is unparalleled in its combination of sustained prosperity, capital controls, and financial crisis. Over several decades, South Korea experienced rapid sustained growth in the presence of capital controls. These controls and the de-linking of domestic and international...

This paper documents an unusual and possibly significant phenomenon: the export of skills embodied in goods, services, or capital from poorer to richer countries. We first present a set of stylized facts. Using a measure that combines the sophistication of a country’s exports with the average...

The Doha Round is the longest-running trade liberalization negotiation in the postwar era. Despite its longevity, the end is not yet in sight as parties disagree on the depth of liberalization necessary in agriculture and nonagricultural market access (NAMA). This rift is prolonging the Round's...

Most forecasts for emerging and developing economies reflect excessive optimism that is both statistically significant and economically relevant, according to a study of forecasts for horizons of up to 20 years in more than 100 countries. This Policy Brief argues that for rapidly growing...

The United States and China are among the world's largest trading nations. They serve as the destination and source of the world's largest flows of foreign direct investment, and they participate in regional economic arrangements on trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts...

As the United States emerges from the Great Recession, concern is rising over the issues of income inequality, stagnation of wages, and especially the struggles of lower-skilled workers at the bottom end of the wage scale. A number of major American employers—for example, Aetna and...

The new chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, contends that there is considerable slack in the labor market, and that the Fed is monitoring several measures of labor market conditions to assess that problem. This Policy Brief provides new analysis on one of these measures, the US labor...