To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates. We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the world,...

This paper explores the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over the both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting poor countries between 1865 and 2007. A single equation error correction model...

Emerging world countries have experienced over the last two decades a significant change in their trade patterns. Bold trade reforms have been followed by rapid rises in international trade levels. However, despite these radical changes, we know remarkably little about how changes in trade...

Australia has experienced frequent and large commodity export price shocks like Third World commodity exporters, but this price volatility has had much more modest impact on economic performance. Why? This paper explores Australian terms of trade volatility since 1901. It identifies two major...

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade...

The export booms in South Korea and Taiwan starting in the early 1960s are anomalous when compared with later export booms in other, non-East Asian countries such as Chile and Turkey. First, these booms have taken place in the context of comparatively small changes in relative prices in favour...

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

The literature has shown that the implied welfare gains from international financial integration are very small. We revisit the existing findings and document that welfare gains can be substantial if capital goods are not perfect substitutes. We use a model of optimal savings that includes a...

Many countries have failed to use natural resource wealth to promote growth and development. They have been damaged by volatility of revenues, have failed to save a sufficiently high proportion of their resource revenues and failed to make high return investments to support diversification of...