According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries' growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured; and...

Sectoral concentration of exports has been a longstanding matter of concern for policymakers in developing countries. According to the economic theory and recent empirical evidence, improved market access through trade arrangements is likely to favor export diversification. In this paper, we...

Our knowledge of the trade effects of domestic infrastructure is very limited. The reason is twofold. First, data needed to examine these effects are not readily available. Second, identifying such effects requires properly addressing potential endogeneity problems affecting the relationship...

Assessing the trade impacts of domestic transport costs is data demanding and analyses that examine the effects of road quality, a critical aspect in regional and public policy, practically do not exist in the international trade literature. The few studies available rely mostly on distancebased...

While many studies explain the correlation between firm-level productivity and export status entirely by better firms self-selecting into exporting, a few studies find evidence of reverse causation. Especially in developing or transition economies, exporters seem to improve performance after...

This study evaluates the major changes in the main sectors of structural economy policy in Latin America between 1985 and 2009, and proposes a set of indices intended to measure the extent to which commercial, financial, tax, privatization and labor policies are favorable for the free operation...

Este documento analiza los grandes cambios en las principales áreas de política económica estructural en América Latina entre 1985 y 2009 y presenta un conjunto de índices que intentan medir qué tan favorables son para el libre funcionamiento de los mercados las políticas comercial,...

This paper shows that bank linkages have a positive effect on international trade. A global banking network (GBN) is constructed at the bank level, using individual syndicated loan data from Loan Analytics for 1990-2007. Network distance between bank pairs is computed and aggregated to country...

Using establishment-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we assess the market power of exporting firms across 16 countries in Latin America. Leveraging information on export destinations, as well as exchange rate and price data, we construct exchange rate-driven shocks to the...

Accurately classifying products is essential in international trade. Virtually all countries categorize products into tariff lines using the Harmonized System (HS) nomenclature for both statistical and duty collection purposes. In this paper, we apply and assess several different algorithms to...