Small and poor countries pose a challenge for the World Trade Organization (WTO). These countries have acquired a significant say in WTO decision-making. However, they have limited ability to engage in the reciprocity game that is at the heart of the WTO, and have limited interests in the...

This paper furnishes robust evidence that the GATT/WTO has had a powerful and positive impact on trade. The impact has, however, been uneven. GATT/WTO membership for industrial countries has been associated with a large increase in imports estimated at about 40 percent of world trade. The same...

This paper explores the causes of India's productivity surge around 1980, more than a decade before serious economic reforms were initiated. Trade liberalization, expansionary demand, a favorable external environment, and improved agricultural performance did not play a role. We find evidence...

We examine the effect of tariff policies on evasion of customs duties, in the context of the trade reform in India of the 1990s. We exploit the variation in tariff rates across time and products to identify the evasion elasticity, namely, the effect of tariffs on evasion, and relate this...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between trade and total factor productivity (TFP) in South Africa. It uses (i) a time series approach where trade is defined in terms of aggregate outcomes, i.e., as the share of imports plus exports in GDP, and (ii) a cross sectional approach,...

We review the impact of the global financial crisis, and its spillovers into the sovereign sector of the euro area, on the international “rules of the game†for dealing with sovereign debt crises. These rules rest on two main pillars. The most important is the IMF’s lending...

This paper investigates the drivers of reserves in emerging markets (EMs) and small island (SIs) and develops an operational metric for estimating reserves in SIs taking into account their unique characteristics. It uses quantile regression techniques to allow the estimated factors driving...

Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good—for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we...

Global imbalances have been a central theme of the international economic policy debate for much of the last decade, prompted by large and sustained current account deficits in the U.S. and counterpart surpluses in China, Germany, and among many of the oil producers. This paper focuses on the...

Efforts to liberalize world trade are increasingly focusing on strengthening the links between low-income countries’ trade policies and their development strategies. However, although greater trade openness promises faster growth for poor countries, it also presents risks to those with...