"Previous work has shown that firms in low and middle-income countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that feel greater pressure to innovate from their competitors are more likely to introduce new products and services than firms that do not feel pressure (Carlin and others 2001; World Bank...

Mauritius is a well known successful development story. The country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita rose from 38 percent below the world average in 1981 to 16 percent above the average by 2008. Such a performance is not the fruit of luck or use of natural advantages as it was...

While Malaysia's digital economy had already been growing rapidly over the past decade, the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has further accelerated this trend. In particular, increased access to digital platforms has enabled businesses of all sizes to mitigate the crisis' adverse...

In an increasingly competitive, globalizing world, Bangladesh needs to rationalize its tariff structure and lower overall protection so that its exports can compete in world markets. At the same time, the government needs to protect revenues in a fiscally-constrained year. This note proposes a...

Syria made promotion of non-oil exports one of the main objectives of its development strategy to counter the emerging twin balance of payments and fiscal deficits resulting from secular decline of oil production and exports. To realize this objective, the Government has implemented a number of...

For a small and landlocked country like North Macedonia, trade integration is particularly important to sustain the country's economic growth and transformation. The importance of trade became even more visible during a global crisis and in the post-pandemic recovery period. Trade integration...

"The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree...