Trade unit values are commonly used as proxies for trade prices in empirical research in international economics. Existing datasets providing international trade unit values for a large number of countries typically suffer from a number of statistical biases, due to the aggregation of unit...

This paper uses micro-data on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a...

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...

We review the competing explanations of the 2007-2008 global crisis, recall how governments around the world had to depart from established policy stances, and reflect on the legacy of the crisis both in terms of future challenges and changes in policy doctrine. The G-20 has addressed important...

A “lost decade” refers to an extended period of low or negative growth triggered by an economic crisis and that could have been avoided by the use of efficient crisis policies. The risk to the world’s developed economies of a lost decade was highlighted early on in the 2007-2008 crisis....

This paper aims at assessing the impact of environmental regulations on the export activity of firms in China. The environmental policy we study is the so- called Two Control Zones (TCZ) policy, which has been implemented in 1998 in China. The aim of this policy was to reduce the sulfur dioxide...

In this study, we explore how the intensity of foreign export spillovers in China varies depending on the difficulty of entry on export markets. We rely on different proxies to define what a “difficult” country is and we find that the presence of surrounding foreign exporting firms helps...

In order to develop trade in services, the GATS aims to eliminate progressively discriminatory regulations, which apply to foreign suppliers. This paper looks instead at the trade effect of domestic regulations, which apply to all firms indifferently and do not intend to exclude imports. We...

Since the global crisis, China's foreign trade is no longer driven by its involvement in the global supply chains (i.e. by processing trade) but its dynamics stems from China’s own domestic demand and supply. For foreign funded enterprises, China is less and less a production base for export...

Since 2007 China has considerably reduced its external global imbalances. Its bilateral trade surpluses with the EU and the US have persisted because the rise of China’s import demand has mainly benefited its Asian neighbors and the resource rich countries. The rapid growth of China’s...