The literature on the benefits and costs of financial globalization for developing countries has exploded in recent years, but along many disparate channels and with a variety of apparently conflicting results. For instance, there is still little robust evidence of the growth benefits of broad...

This paper examines different explanations-initial conditions, openness to trade and FDI, and institutions-of the Mauritian growth experience since the mid-1970s. We show that arguments based on openness to trade and FDI are either misleading or incomplete, and the transmission mechanism...

China's sectoral trade composition, product quality mix, and import content of processing exports have all changed substantially during the past decade. This has rendered trade elasticities estimated using aggregate data highly unstable, with more recent data pointing to significantly higher...

Is the recent proliferation of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in Asia a healthy development, or runs the risk of turning into an unmanageable "noodle bowl" in the future? The goal of this paper is to shed some light on this question. The results show that membership in the Asian RTAs...

We examine the effect of non-zero, long-run foreign asset positions on consumption dynamics in response to productivity shocks in a two-country, dynamic, general equilibrium model, with different discount factors across countries populated by overlapping generations of households. We then...

The export performance of Sub-Saharan Africa has lagged behind that of developing countries in other regions for the past two decades, and total export proceeds have fallen significantly since 1980. Many factors explain this outcome, including continued concentration in slowly-growing non-fuel...

This paper examines the question: Who bears the larger portion of the excess burden of a tariff-the country that imposes it, or a country that it trades with? For a country that can influence its terms of trade, there are two ways of approaching this question. This paper shows that under certain...

This paper studies the structure and evolution of trade protection in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries in the 1990s. MENA countries use tariffs and nontariff barriers, and tariff dispersion and nontariff barriers, as substitute protection measures. Tariff levels and tariff...

This paper analyzes the Czechoslovak reform program which was launched on January 1, 1991. Under this program, Czechoslovakia has taken decisive steps to establish a market economy, while achieving price stability and a viable external position through restrictive financial policies. But there...

This study investigates the role of India's economy in explaining the observed growth in South Asia, taking into consideration other sources of growth endogenous to the countries in the region. Since a review of key variables indicates that India's bilateral trade and financial linkages with...