China has always strived for self-sufficiency in farm products, particularly staple foods. Its rapid industrialization following its opening up to global markets during the past two decades has been making that more difficult, and its accession to the WTO may add to that difficulty. New...

By applying panel estimation models to Chinese provincial level data for 1993-2008, this paper examine the impacts of China's coastal foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports on its inland regions. The results show that coastal FDI has overall positive interregional impacts, while coastal...

China is a success story of inclusive trade growth as a result of its participation in Global Value Chains (GVCs). It is in transition from a processing and assembly hub towards an innovation centre, and is becoming a regional supplier of research and development (R&D) intensive parts and...

China's early industrialization created distortions.This paper identifies major distortions in the Chinese economy in the pre-reform era and brings agricultural distortions into perspective.

If South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are to become constructively engaged in the next attempt by World Trade Organization (WTO) members to liberalize trade multilaterally, they need to be convinced that there will be sufficient gains from trade reform to warrant the inevitable costs of...

The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones. We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate...

The elasticity of substitution between goods from different countries—the Armington elasticity—is important for many questions in international economics, but its magnitude is subject to debate: the "macro" elasticity between home and import goods is often found to be smaller than the...

This paper argues that the theoretical foundations for the gravity equation are general, while the empirical performance of the gravity equation is specific to the type of goods examined. Most existing theory for the gravity equation depends on the assumption of differentiated goods. We show...

This paper develops a procedure to rank-order countries and commodities using disaggregated US imports data. It finds strong evidence that both countries and commodities can be ranked, consistent with the ‘product cycle’ hypothesis. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United...