The system of global agricultural and food trade is undergoing rapid processes of change, with important implications for economic development. In this paper we document and discuss these changes; including the rapid growth and structural change in agri-food trade, the increased consolidation in...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes—reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints—were meant to partially insulate...

This paper builds a DSGE model for a small open economy (SOE) in which the central bank intervenes the domestic currency bond and FX markets using two policy rules: a Taylor-type rule and a rule that determines the rate of nominal depreciation. The 2 'corner' regimes, in which only one policy...

This paper provides a review of the available literature on global value chains (GVCs) and employment markets in developing countries. Due to the difficulty of observing intra-GVC transactions, there is very little direct empirical work on GVCs and labour markets. However, it is possible to...

Indonesia has come a long way in improving its tax system over the last decade, both in terms of revenues raised and administrative efficiency. Nonetheless, the tax take is still low, given the need for more spending on infrastructure and social protection. With the exception of the natural...

As more and more countries seek to liberalise their foreign investment regimes to attract global flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), an essential question for policy-makers is no longer just what to reform but also how to reform. How is a reformist government to sell the idea of reform to...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

A traditional way of thinking about the exchange rate (XR) regime and capital account openness has been framed in terms of the 'impossible trinity' or 'trilemma', in which policymakers can only have 2 of 3 possible outcomes: open capital markets, monetary independence and pegged XRs. This paper...

The manufacturing sectors in Latin America have been more affected by the currency over/undervaluation than their counterpart in industrialized economies. From a panel data set covering 39 countries and 22 manufacturing sectors (2-digit) within 1995-2008, we formally test the hypothesis that...

In principle, the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) offers uniform market access to exports from eligible developing countries for a broad set of GSP-eligible products. In practice, realized GSP tariff-exemptions demonstrate marked variation across countries, industries, and years. In...