Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance,...

The Millennium Round of MTNs, which was stillborn in Seattle, was supposed to have initiated wide-sweeping changes to the world's trading system. This paper deals with the impact on the German economy of some changes that might have been forthcoming from proposed liberalization strategies. It...

For Africa, a regional customs union is unlikely to realise net welfare gains (in the sense of trade creation dominating trade diversion) which cannot be attained through unilateral trade liberalization. Unilateral reform has often failed in Africa, however. A regional customs union tied to...

We develop a model where trade liberalization leads to skill-biased technological change, which in turn raises the relative return to skilled labour. As firms get access to a larger market, they have incentives to choose a more skill-intensive technology because a lowering of variable costs...

The paper examines why ‘globaphobia’ seems to be more prevalent among labour in the United States than in Europe. It argues that globalization has generated more wealth, but also more income inequality and adjustment problems, in America than in Europe. In the United States, the median voter...

This paper evaluates firms' exporting responses to BRI and considers their heterogeneity in ownership types, product types, regional origin and trade mode. This is done by analyzing firm-product-destination level customs data from 2011 to 2015 in a gravity model framework. Our empirical results...

What is the impact of movement towards free trade on output? Can this impact permanently affect output levels, and more importantly, will it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? This paper provides empirical evidence showing how countries have exhibited substantial increases in their...

This paper traces the links from trade shocks to poverty in developing countries. It considers the determinants of household and individual welfare (including potential differences between household members) and then identifies six trade-to-poverty links: the extent to which prices change and...

This paper has two purposes. It introduces a direct approach to policy analysis in endogenous growth models - the q-theory approach - and uses this to illustrate several new openness-and-growth links that appear when we enrich the economic content of the early trade and growth models. The...

This Paper analyses the effects of reducing trade costs on the location of manufacturing firms that are vertically linked and differ in factor intensities. I extend the new economic geography literature, by embedding a model with vertical linkages within a Heckscher-Ohlin framework. Firms can...