"Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis,...

Trade can dramatically improve women's lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women's bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between...

The paper is structured in six further sections following this introduction. Section two develops a conceptual framework, and reviews the literature on the relationship between trade integration and labor market outcomes. Section three outlines the empirical framework and data used in the...

Global trade growth slowed in 2018 amid a weakening of economic growth in China and the Euro Area and rising trade protectionism. The volume of trade grew by 3.8 percent, down from 5.4 percent in 2017, but has shown signs of reviving in the first quarter of 2019. However, the U.S. tariff...

Preferential trade agreements have become deeper over time, often encompassing policy areas that go beyond traditional trade policy, such as investment, competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In the literature, a prominent argument why countries sign "deep" agreements is to...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...

How does geographic distance affect the impact of trade agreements on bilateral exports, and through what channels? This paper examines this questions in a gravity model context for different types of goods for 185 countries over the period 1965-2010. Three stylized facts emerge. First, although...

Services play a role in global value chains in many ways, similar to goods. But services deserve special attention because of how they are transacted, how they affect downstream sectors, how they are regulated, and how international cooperation can contribute to integrating national markets....

This paper focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical