The proliferation of RTAs is a central feature of the world trade policy environment in the last 20 years. This paper provides an empirical study of the extent to which the formation of RTAs has changed the distribution of world goods trade among trading partners. To do this, it constructs a new...

This paper replicates the study of Topalova (2010), performs a robustness check, and extends the findings by applying the estimation technique to the economy of Thailand. Topalova (2010) found that trade liberalization in India has heterogenous effects on poverty and household consumption. More...

This paper examines the impact of digital trade on wealth inequality for 40 developed and developing member countries of the UNESCAP Asia Pacific region, for the period from 2005-2021. Data on digital trade, measured using two indicators, namely, trade in digitally deliverable services and trade...

This paper explores the kinds of demands governments in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) could and should be formulating and submitting in the context of the e-commerce negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as well as any current or proposed Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) they are...

Over the last three years, trade tensions between the United States (US) and China have transformed a fairly open bilateral trading environment into a rather protectionist one. The new administration of the United States has maintained most of the bilateral tariffs and non-tariff barriers put in...

The Belt Road Initiative (BRI) suggested by China's President Xi Jinping provides an ambitious vision encouraging a new level of cooperation among countries along several economic corridors spanning most of the Asian economies member of ESCAP. This paper reviews the trade and trade facilitation...

There is a crisis in multilateralism. This paper examines multilateralism by looking at the two most important current efforts to devise new multilateral rules binding all nations; the negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) of trade rules and the negotiations under the United Nations...

Digitally deliverable services play a growing role in export-driven production in the FEALAC region, but digitally deliverable services from Latin America are used only to a limited extent by producers in Asia, and vice versa. However, this disguises the fast growth in Latin American-Asian...

Trade and investment can be effective means of implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. However, stand-alone trade and investment liberalization policies aimed at enhancing economic development may have negative side-effects on non-economic facets of sustainable development. As...

This study estimates the effect of trade facilitation measures implementation on trade costs in Asia and the Pacific using data from the United Nations Global Survey on Trade Facilitation and Paperless Trade Implementation. Impact of different sets of measures are considered, from a basic set of...