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...

Economic theory suggests that countries’ tariff commitments in trade agreements reflect their import market power at the time of negotiations. However, as countries grow, their market power in different sectors can change in unforeseen ways and their commitments may no longer reflect changed...

This paper discusses five indicators of competitiveness: real exchange rates based on consumer price indices, export unit values of manufacturing goods, the relative price of traded to nontraded goods, normalized unit labor costs in manufacturing, and the ratio of normalized unit labor costs to...

All common real effective exchange rate indexes assume trade is only in final goods, despite the growing presence of global supply chains. Extending effective exchange rate indexes to include such intermediate goods can imply radically different effective exchange rate weights, depending on the...

We examine the extent to which regulations of entry and credit access are related to competition using data on 28 manufacturing sectors across 64 countries. A robust finding is that bureaucratic and costly entry regulations tend to hamper competition, as proxied by the price-cost margin, in the...

The paper explores how international integration through global value chains shapes the working of exchange rates to induce external adjustment both in the short and medium run. The analysis indicates that greater integration into international value chains reduces the exchange rate elasticity...

This paper empirically examines the extent to which a country's economic growth is influenced by its trading partner economies. Panel estimation results based on four decades of data for over 100 countries show that trading partners' growth and relative income levels have a strong effect on...

This paper presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date panel data set of invoicing currencies in global trade. It provides data on the shares of exports and imports invoiced in US dollars, euros, and other currencies for more than 100 countries since 1990. The evidence from these data...