Trade promotes economic growth, alleviates poverty and helps countries reach their development goals. However, developing countries – in particular the least developed – face difficulties in making trade happen and turning trade into economic growth. The Aid for Trade Initiative – launched...

One reason donors provide foreign aid is to support their exports to aid-recipient countries. Time series data for Germany suggests an average return of between US$ 1.04 to US$ 1.50 for each US dollar of aid spent by Germany. Although this is well below previous estimates, the value is robust to...

This paper presents a review of the Aid for Trade program introduced by the World Trade Organization in 2005. Although the volume of international trade has been growing, it is mainly due to the developed countries and some Asian emerging countries. In spite of the favourable market access...

Although the concept of aid for trade has quickly gained prominence among aid donors as well as aid recipients, relatively little is known about its impact on trade-related performance. This paper uses statistical evidence to examine the effects of aid for trade on the costs of trading and on...

Existing research generally finds weak positive effects of aid for trade (AfT) on aggregate merchandise trade of recipients once endogeneity in the AfT-trade relationship is accounted for. In this paper, we confirm weak findings for both aggregate merchandise and services trade of recipients,...

The empirical literature on aid for trade (AfT) mainly considers its effects on merchandise trade and investment. In this paper we examine the relationship between AfT and trade in services as well as trade in goods over 2002-2015 in both aggregate and bilateral analysis. We observe...

Anderson and vanWincoop (2003) developed what has become the standard framework for framing and interpreting empirical work using the gravity model. Its main advantage is that it recognizes and tackles the issue of endogeneity of prices. Hoverer, two shortcomings of their framework are that 1)...