This paper empirically investigates the impact of tariffs when production is organized in global value chains. Using global input-output matrices, we construct four different tariff measures that capture the direct and indirect exposure to tariffs at different stages of the production chain for...

Distance, as a proxy for trade barriers, is found in many studies to matter even for weightless cross-border financial investments and lending, possibly due to the presence of information asymmetries. Its importance is tested in this paper using exports of all five broad categories of the...

Against the backdrop of the rise of global value chains (GVCs), particularly in Asia, this paper documents key developments of GVCs and investigates what factors cause economies to reap greater benefits from GVC participation. Key findings include: first, moving toward a more upstream position...

Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural...

Singapore is one of the world's most open economies, with the size of its trade reaching about 350 percent of its GDP. With the rise of highly diversified cross-border production networks, Singapore has come to play an integral role in the global supply chain with heavy reliance on foreign...

This paper examines the impact of trade on employment, wages, and other outcomes across countries and explores the conditions and policies that help spread the gains from trade more evenly throughout the population. We exploit a large global firm-level dataset to examine the impact of import...

The global economic crisis has affected the East Asian economies via trade and investment. The export-led model which had been responsible for the “East Asian Miracle” now must redirect the basis of growth from exports sent to the US and Europe to regional and domestic demand. Regional trade...

This paper studies the potential for the export sector to play a more important role in promoting growth in Central America, Panama, and the Dominican Republic (CAPDR) through deeper intra-regional and global trade integration. CAPDR countries have enacted many free trade agreements and other...

Global smartphone sales may have peaked. After reaching nearly 1.5 billion units in 2016, global smartphone sales have since declined, contributing negatively to world trade in 2019 and suggesting that the global market may now be saturated. This paper develops a simple model to forecast...

This paper reassesses the impact of trade liberalization on productivity. We build a new, unique database of effective tariff rates at the country-industry level for a broad range of countries over the past two decades. We then explore both the direct effect of liberalization in the sector...