Global trade has been exceptionally weak over the past four years. While global trade grew at approximately twice the rate of GDP prior to the Great Recession, the ratio of global trade to GDP growth has declined to about unity since 2012. This paper assesses to what extent the change in the...

We provide a comprehensive review of the literature on the economic impact of pandemics and identify the transmission channels at play. The primary channel comes from the supply side, as pandemics reduce both the quantity and the quality of labour. They can also lead to a destruc-tion of...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the size of a country, the size of its cities, and the economic performance of the country. In order to do this we integrate three different literature, namely the literature on optimal country size, literature on historical processes of...