The European Union (EU) is the biggest integrated economic zone and a guarantor of an open and predictable regulatory system able to determine its own economic destiny. But the behaviour of other global powers is increasingly calling this ability into question. China and the United States,...

The world economy is going through its biggest transformation in a relatively short space time. There have been many explanations for this phenomenon but the unprecedented scale and pace of this change and, most crucially, its implications, still seems little understood. In turn, there has been...

The authors review current developments in international trade and its prospects for the future arguing that despite the recent slowdown, trade remains an important driver of economic growth and development. Scepticism towards further trade opening needs to be addressed, notably via appropriate...

Globalization has brought about a rapid expansion of international trade and a dramatic change in trade structure. The liberalization of trade in goods and services, containerization, new integrated transport networks, advances in information communication technology and modern business...

Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed...

In 1995 a reform group headed by Senegal's Ministry of trade introduced a single window system for electronic trade facilitation as part of a reform agenda to improve the country's business environment. Launched in 2004, the system transformed customs clearance, streamlining the process through...

We discuss how standard computable equilibrium models of trade policy can be enriched with selection effects without missing other important channels of adjustment. This is achieved by estimating and simulating a partial equilibrium model that accounts for a number of real world effects of trade...