The exposure of low-income countries to natural disasters has a significant impact on food production and food security. This paper provides a framework for assessing a country's vulnerability to food crisis in the event of natural disasters. The paper finds that macroeconomic and structural...

This paper analyzes the domestic and external drivers of local staple food prices in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data on domestic market prices of the five most consumed staple foods from 15 countries, this paper finds that external factors drive food price inflation, but domestic factors can...

This paper examines the implications of elevated global food prices for inflation in select Central Asian economies - Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The findings suggest that global food inflation has significant short-run effects that build over time. Inflation...

International trade is vital for economic prosperity in Pacific island countries, but their trade performance has been weak over the past decade with the exception of resource-rich countries. Small country size and remoteness from global economic centers may have contributed to this relatively...

This paper analyzes the links between financial and trade openness and financial development in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It is based on a panel dataset using methods that tackle slope heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence and non-stationarity, important econometric problems that...

We present and discuss a set of indicators to help assess countries' trade policies. The indicators relate to three policy areas - trade in goods, trade in services, and FDI. Given concerns about the direction of global trade policy, we also consider a set of more granular measures that reflect...

Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural...

This paper assesses how regional trade agreements (RTAs) impact growth volatility on a worldwide sample of 170 countries with data spanning the period 1978-2012.Notwithstanding concerns that trade openness through RTAs can heighten exposure to shocks, in particular when it leads to increased...

We revisit the relationship between international trade, economic growth and inequality with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. The paper combines two approaches: First, we employ a cross-country panel framework to analyze the macroeconomic effects of international trade on economic...

Over the past 20 years, the Chinese authorities have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of their exchange and trade systems that have steadily reduced the role of planning and increased the importance of market forces. As these reforms have taken root, relative prices and domestic and foreign...