Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have proliferated over the past decade around the world to cover nearly half of global trade. The number of RTAs notified to the WTO is approaching 200, while the total number of RTAs around the world exceeds 300. The global RTA spree has forged a veritable...

This IDB Working Paper is intended to provide an overview of how the agricultural sector is treated in regional trade agreements (RTAs) involving Latin American countries, whose exports tend to be more oriented towards agriculture. The paper compares the treatment of agriculture in RTAs between...

After a half century of overtly inward-oriented policies, Brazil finally moved to open its trade regime in the early 1990s. Being one the last countries to make this move in a region that notoriously lagged behind East Asia, Brazil was quick to implement a comprehensive trade liberalization...

As Latin America and the Caribbean bounce back from a sanitary crisis of historic proportions, the search is on for policies that can accelerate recovery while boosting longterm growth. In a scenario of tight fiscal constraints, trade and integration (T&I) policies seem to fit this description....

Online Technical Appendix to "Fighting Global Warming: Is Trade Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean a Help or a Hindrance?"It describes in more detail the data sources, the empirical strategy; and presents a series of robustness checks.

The dire prospects of global warming have been increasing the pressure on policymakers to use trade policy as a mitigation tool, challenging trade economists' canonical "targeting principle." Even though the justifications for this stance remain as valid as ever, it no longer seems feasible in a...

Online Technical Appendix to "The Reorganization of Global Value Chains: What's in it for Latin America and the Caribbean?" It describes in more detail the data sources, the empirical strategy; and presents a series of robustness checks.

In this paper, we relate outcomes of El Salvadors local labor markets to their exposure to Chinese import competition. Using annual household surveys for 2000 to 2014, we construct a panel dataset of 61 local labor markets over 15 years to study three sets of outcomes: manufacturing employment,...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of Chinese competition on manufacturing firms in El Salvador between 2005 and 2013 using manufacturing survey data and customs transaction data. We find that Chinese import competition in El Salvador has a negative effect on firms employment, total factor...