Many recent papers have pointed to ambiguous trade effects of developing regional trade agreements, calling for a reassessment of their economic merits. This paper focuses on 22 RTAs involving mostly developing countries and covering all the continents and use trade flows over the period...

In new economic geography models, geographic concentration cant arise because of workers mobility or vertical linkages between firms. We examine a setup that combines those two approaches in conjunction with local congestion costs. We find that, as trade costs are lowered, the geographic...

Since the early 1980s, Turkey has been going through a rapid urbanization process at a pace beyond the World average. This paper aims at assessing the impact of this rapid urbanization process on the country's sector productivity. The authors built a database combining two-digit manufacturing...

Many recent papers have pointed to ambiguous trade effects of developing regional trade agreements (RTAs), calling for a reassessment of their economic merits. The author focuses on seven such agreements currently in force in Sub-Saharan Africa (ECOWAS and SADC), Asia (AFTA and SAPTA) and Latin...

Intra-sub-Saharan African trade appears to be very low, an outcome that is often justified on the grounds of the size of the exporting and the importing economies. If that were the explanation, there would be no untapped trade potential. We argue instead that the main determinant of this...