We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

This paper furnishes robust evidence that the WTO has had a powerful and positive impact on trade, amounting to about 120% of additional world trade (or US$8 trillion in 2003 alone). The impact has, however, been uneven. This, in many ways, is consistent with theoretical models of the GATT/WTO....

Most conventional accounts of India’s recent economic performance associate the pick-up in economic growth with the liberalization of 1991. This Paper demonstrates that the transition to high growth occurred around 1980, a full decade before economic liberalization. We investigate a number of...

The focus of trade policy has shifted in recent years from economy-wide reductions in tariffs and trade restrictions towards targeted interventions to facilitate trade and promote exports. Most of these latter interventions are based on the new mantra of "aid-for-trade" rather than on hard...

Little progress has been made since the creation of the WTO in expanding and deepening the coverage of services liberalization commitments. This paper identifies and discusses five hypotheses that may explain the absence of dynamism: (i) technological changes allow ever more services to be...

Initiatives to improve market access for the poorest countries have recently been announced by the European Union, Japan and the United States. This Paper assesses the impact on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) of these initiatives and others that might be taken. We find that fully unrestricted access...

While there is considerable empirical evidence on the impact of liberalizing trade in goods, the effects of services liberalization have not been empirically established. This study examines the link between services sector reforms and the productivity of manufacturing industries relying on...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can take place either through the direct entry of foreign firms or the acquisition of existing domestic firms. The preferences of a foreign firm and the host country government over these two modes of FDI are examined in the presence of costly technology transfer....

The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO’s valuable role in restraining protectionism. What is on the table would...

This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the WTO. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. We argue that moving forward on...