Analyzes the banana industry crisis and its labour related effects. Highlights the continuing importance of the banana industry to the region.

As international trade has expanded dramatically in the postwar period--an expansion accelerated by the opening of China, Russia, India, and Eastern Europe--illicit international trade has grown in tandem with it. This volume uses the economist's toolkit to examine the economic, political, and...

In the early 1990s, trade and labor economists, noting the fall in wages for low-skilled workers relative to high-skilled workers, began to debate the impact of trade on wages. This debate—which led to a sometimes heated exchange on the role of trade versus the role of technological change in...

As trade liberalization and the fragmentation of production processes promote greater international exchange of inputs, economists must adjust their thinking on trade issues. Transport costs have plummeted, and the difficulties of communicating between locales half a world apart have practically...

Like the rest of the poor periphery, Mexico had to deal with de-industrialization forces between 1750 and 1913, those critical 150 years when the economic gap between the industrial core and the primary-product-producing periphery widened to such huge dimensions. Yet, from independence to...

This paper presents firm- level evidence on the dynamics of the relative demand for non-manual workers in Italian manufacturing during the 1990s. The analysis provides a number of interesting results. First, within-firm skill upgrading is the main determinant of the increase in the non-manual...

We study the changing international transmission of US financial shocks over the period 1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to...

With increasing sophistication, economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades. Robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain. We therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance, despite...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labour productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

What is the impact of Chinese import competition on Nordic producer prices? In a panel covering 23 (2 digit) NACE manufacturing sectors from 1995 to 2008, instrumental variable estimations predict that when Chinese imports capture a 1% increase in market share, Nordic producer prices decrease by...