"Professional skills are scarce in Mozambique, even by the standards of low-income countries. The solution, however, is not necessarily to create more Mozambican training institutions but to address market-specific problems. Where skills are already the binding constraint (for example, in...

"Services trade reform matters, but what is Doha doing about it? It has been hard to judge, because of the opaqueness of services policies and the opaqueness of the request-offer negotiating process. This paper attempts to assess what is on the table. It presents the results of the first survey...

"Much attention has focused on the impact of the current crisis on goods trade; hardly any on its impact on services trade. Using new trade data from the United States, and more aggregate data from other OECD countries, the authors show that services trade is weathering the current crisis much...

"There is a fundamental shift taking place in the world economy to which the multilateral trading system has failed to adapt. The Doha process focused on issues of limited significance while the burning issues of the day were not even on the negotiating agenda. This paper advances five...

"The outlines of a potential agreement, emerging after seven years of negotiations, imply that Doha offers three key benefits: reduced uncertainty of market access in goods and services; improved market access in agriculture and manufacturing; and the mobilization of resources to deal with the...

"The authors analyze recent efforts at international cooperation to limit illegal migration, particularly through the use of legal migration avenues like guest worker schemes. They show that while guest worker schemes may be desirable as an avenue of international migration, they are an...

"The benefits of services trade reform are huge but services negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) are making little progress. A proximate cause is the current negotiating process, based on an inertial request-and-offer approach rather than a set of goals that would give direction...

"There is limited trade in health services despite big differences in the price of health care across countries. Whether patients travel abroad for health care depends on the coverage of treatments by their health insurance plan. Under existing health insurance contracts, the gains from trade...

"Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and unconditionally blessed by multilateral trade rules. Chen and Mattoo find, theoretically and empirically, that such agreements increase trade between participating countries but not necessarily with the rest of the...