Alleviating poverty through direct assistance and economic growth is an important objective of the World Bank. For this strategy to succeed, all potential impediments to the competitiveness of export industries must be tackled and reduced. Informational trade performance and efficiency are...

Since approximately 1990, most countries in Latin America have embarked on a unilateral process of trade liberalization for agricultural and non-agricultural products, effectively putting an end to four decades of import-substitution policies. Most countries adopted tariffication, with bound...

Many developing countries enforce seed regulations and other policies that obstruct private companies from operating and delivering new technology. This volume presents recommendations and selected papers from an international workshop organized by the World Bank in 1995 to review seed policies...

This study investigates the economic impacts of accession to the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) by the new member countries of Cambodia, the Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam. The trade policies of these countries are examined, and a series of quantitative analyses were undertaken to evaluate the...

The study explores important trends in consumption patterns in European Union(EU) markets and assesses the degree to which these patterns offer opportunities for African exporters.

OECD trade barriers did not play a significant role in Sub-Saharan Africa's declining position in world trade over the last three decades. The detrimental effects of the African countries' own policies, such as those that influence international transport costs, were considerably more important....

This report is part of a larger series of stocktaking and analytical products on plastic pollution in South Asia. It supports the Bank's commitment to work with countries of South Asia to pursue and scale-up policies and programs that help them move toward a circular plastic economy and, in...

South Asia region's economies continue on a recovery path, with production and export having recovered to pre-COVID trend levels. But the recovery has been uneven across countries and sectors, and significant risks exist that could jeopardize short-term recovery and long-term growth. Over the...

This report provides a region-wide analysis on the status of the digital economy in South Asia. It identifies opportunities and challenges for national and regional action to realize the transformational potential of digitalizing economies, societies, and governments. The report synthesizes and...

The report presents both the opportunities of and the bottlenecks for furthering the digital agenda. It emphasizes that the first step is to get the basics right. This includes enabling access to and adoption of high-quality affordable broadband, initiating a paradigm shift in building digital...