The EU Services Directive was adopted in 2006 to foster competition in services across Europe. However, progress in liberalizing services has fallen short of expectations due to the article 15 of the Directive, which allows countries to maintain pre-existing restrictions if judged necessary to...

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the...

The services sector is increasingly important for the euro area economy, but productivity growth in the sector has stalled over the past two decades. Remaining barriers to cross-border trade in services within the EU Single Market contribute to this weak performance. Our empirical analysis...

We propose an integrated method based on a two-sector small open economy dynamic and stochastic general equilibrium model to estimate non-tariff barriers and quantify the impact of services liberalization. The major component of trade barriers is explicitly modeled through the introduction of...

Distance, as a proxy for trade barriers, is found in many studies to matter even for weightless cross-border financial investments and lending, possibly due to the presence of information asymmetries. Its importance is tested in this paper using exports of all five broad categories of the...

This paper studies structural changes underlying China's remarkable and unprecedented growth in recent years. While patterns of structural transformation across China's provinces are broadly in line with international experience, one important difference is in labor productivity differentials...

This paper provides an empirical benchmarking of growth, productivity and export patterns for developing NREs against other low and middle income developing countries, to inform policy discussions and future analytical work. There is stark heterogeneity in the association of resource sector and...

Structural transformation depends not only on how much countries export but also on what they export and with whom they trade. This paper breaks new ground in analyzing India's exports by the technological content, quality, sophistication, and complexity of the export basket. We identify five...

This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity...