This study is one component of broader World Bank trade facilitation assistance program provided to the government of the Kingdom of Lesotho (hereafter referred as Lesotho). This note presents key findings from the study, which focused on identifying the challenges faced by women owned, led or...

Indonesia has been pursuing a broad push towards greater trade openness with regional and global partners, seeking to leverage external demand to reach high-income status by 2045. This welcome and timely effort comes amid ongoing trade policy shocks. Our analysis suggests that deeper trade...

• we analyze plurilateral trade agreements that liberalize trade in particular products among a range of countries • the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) covers around 12% of global trade • our theory shows that such agreements can be a way forward for multilateral liberalization in...

How should a developing country such as South Africa respond to the USA's "Liberation Day" Tariffs of April 2025 and subsequent shocks? Combining the GTAP-Dynamic (GDyn) Computable General Equilibrium model with an expanded Decision Support Model (DSM), we simulate five policy response scenarios...

Market forces, and notably the role of trade openness, contribute to shaping inequality in South Africa and may limit the inclusiveness of its growth path. Recently, policy reforms may have helped to mitigate these effects. To better understand these developments, we analyse trends in post-tax...

We study how the end of the quota system for textiles and clothing products in the American and European markets on January 1, 2005, affected China’s exports to third countries, where policy was unchanged. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the number of Chinese firms...

The European Union (EU) emerged as a product and beneficiary of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Yet, as this order disintegrates, marked by multipolarity, thin multilateralism, and the return of power politics, the EU has taken unprecedented integrative steps, including joint debt...

New importers increase their conditional survival rate and import share over time. However, a model of multi-input firms with an import entry cost and stochastic import costs cannot replicate these dynamics. I show that an extended model can be reconciled with the data. I calibrate both models...

We use global tariffs to reveal the weights that nations implicitly place on the welfare of their trading partners relative to their own. Our estimated welfare weights suggest that formal and informal rules of the world trading system make countries internalize the impact of their policies onto...

Südostasien genießt schon lange außenpolitische Priorität in Japan, doch seit etwa 2012 hat Tokio sein Engagement intensiviert - sowohl gegenüber der ASEAN-Gemeinschaft als auch gegenüber einzelnen Mitgliedstaaten. Tokio betrachtet Chinas wachsenden Einfluss in Südostasien als zentrale...

Trump's renewed tariffs on traditional allies-including the EU, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil-signal a return to aggressive protectionism, openly disregarding WTO rules and threatening the stability of the global trade system. The authors argue that unilateral retaliation by individual countries is...

We investigate the relationship between manufacturing sector productivity and two new measures proxying for barriers to trade in services – restrictions affecting payment for cross-border imports of services and receipts for inward investment. Our services trade policy proxies span the...

A major step towards liberalizing the EU Internal Market for services was taken in 2006 with the EU Services Directive. This study quantifies its impact on EU trade in services and real income and identifies untapped potential due to remaining administrative barriers and weak enforcement of...

The second administration of United States President Donald Trump has shaken the foundations of the multilateral trading system by implementing unilateral tariffs on imports from most of its partners, and by signing 'deals' with a few of them. It is impossible to legally reconcile these actions...

Members of the World Trade Organization are increasingly disregarding its rules, raising concerns about the future of the multilateral trading system. To analyze the sustainability of the rules-based trade regime, we develop a dynamic framework of stochastic asynchronous games where the leading...

We present an historical background and narrative of Spanish policies affecting Philippine trade that maps them onto the changing landscape of influential ideas and emerging political and economic exigencies confronting the colonizing power. An integral or global perspective is adopted that...

We use detailed tariff data and a dynamic trade and reallocation model with downward nominal wage rigidities to quantitatively assess the economic consequences of the recent increase in U.S. import tariffs and the responses of its trading partners. Higher tariffs trigger an expansion in U.S....

A considerable amount of existing literature highlights the significance of environmental factors, but limited research has examined the role of green financing in these considerations. The primary aim of this research is to test the relationships between green finance and environmental quality...

Südostasien genießt schon lange außenpolitische Priorität in Japan, doch seit etwa 2012 hat Tokio sein Engagement intensiviert - sowohl gegenüber der ASEAN-Gemeinschaft als auch gegenüber einzelnen Mitgliedstaaten. Tokio betrachtet Chinas wachsenden Einfluss in Südostasien als zentrale...

The paper studies types and mechanisms of vertical and horizontal multilevel institutional governance (IG) (multilevel governance [MLG]). The relation with exports is reviewed and quantified to attempt prioritizing institutional reforms fostering merchandise exports in Egypt.The paper studies...

This paper examines the effects of trade policy shocks on the US economy using a novel identification strategy that combines narrative information with stock market data. We construct a new dataset of daily trade policy statements from 2007 to 2019, enabling us to capture a broad range of policy...