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...

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...

We show that plurilateral agreements facilitate global tariff liberalization by creating an MFN-based margin of cooperation that leaves preferential access via preferential trade agreements (PTAs) unchanged. In a model of endogenous trade agreement formation with farsighted governments, PTAs...

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...

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...

In the modern globalized context, innovation represents a key driver of economic growth, while international trade plays an important role in fostering it. This study examines the relationship between the degree of trade openness and innovation performance across 27 EU member states over the...

This paper examines how logistics performance conditions the relationship between trade openness, economic growth and per capita CO₂ emissions in Mediterranean economies. Using an unbalanced panel of 20 countries over the period 2007-2022, we combine static fixed-effects, dynamic panel...

Global trade flows and supply chains adjust gradually. Empirical estimates of the trade elasticity for the short run are a fraction of those for the long run and suggest that trade is subject to substantive dynamic frictions. We develop a tractable framework that provides microfoundations for...

We show that plurilateral agreements facilitate global tariff liberalization by creating an MFN-based margin of cooperation that leaves preferential access via preferential trade agreements (PTAs) unchanged. In a model of endogenous trade agreement formation with farsighted governments, PTAs...

• 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...

This paper presents a dataset and an analytical framework to study the welfare effects of tariff changes on women. The data is an extension of the Household Impacts of Tariffs (HIT) dataset, which contains harmonized household survey data for 54 low and lower middle-income countries. It includes...

This paper re-examines the role of trade and FDI inflows in accelerating the process of industrial growth involving countries belonging to the "Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)" region. Trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) have improved the growth performance of...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...

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....