There is increasing empirical evidence that trade specialisation and competition takes place in varieties rather than in products or industries. This paper examines recent changes in the export specialisation of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and their Asian competitors by looking at...

Some five years after the severe recession of 2009, private sector investment in Europe is still dangerously sluggish. And public sector investment has been cut, reinforcing the downward trend seen over the past thirty years. In this paper, we discuss the complementarity between private and...

In November 2013, the central committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), at its third plenum, issued a Directives Paper (with 16 items and 60 prescriptions), setting out a long-term strategic compendium of China’s reform agenda, based on the principle of separation between market and...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

This paper investigates the role of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) on bilateral international migration. By increasing the information on the potential destination country, RTAs may favour bilateral migration flows among member countries. Building on the gravity model for migration by Anderson...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...