Trade can play a crucial role in the development of services sectors in Africa. Services offer new dynamic opportunities for exports, especially for land-locked countries, while opening up to imports of services and foreign direct investment is a key mechanism to increase competition and drive...

This policy note is based on a project on financial services and trade agreements in the Latin America and Caribbean Region. It emphasizes that the liberalization of trade in financial services is helpful to, but is not a panacea for, domestic financial system modernization. It adds that the...

"The "New Open Economy Macroeconomics" argues that: (a) non-monetary factors have gained importance in explaining exchange rate volatility, and (b) trade and financial openness may have a potential role of mitigating and/or amplifying real and nominal shocks to real exchange rates. The goal of...

"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...