A surge of exports in the 2000s helped Japan exit the severe decade-long stagnation known as the lost decade. Using panel data of Japanese exporting firms, we examine the sources of the export surge during this period. One view argues that the so-called ""divine wind"" or exogenous external...

Recently, the export performance of France relative to its own past and relative to a major trading partner, Germany, deteriorated. That deterioration seems related to the geographical destination and product composition of trend exports. Faced with an increase in unit labor costs or in its...

This paper estimates the impact of external demand shocks on real income. We utilize a first order approximation to a wide class of small open economy models that feature sector-level gravity in trade flows, which allows us to measure foreign shocks and characterize their welfare impact in terms...

This paper studies the relationship between export structure and growth performance. We design an export recommendation system using a collaborative filtering algorithm based on countries' revealed comparative advantages. The system is used to produce export portfolio recommendations covering...

This paper seeks to investigate the transmission mechanisms linking productivity to the real exchange rate in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. At first glance, the stylized facts-low labor productivity growth and a trend real depreciation-suggest that a Balassa- Samuelson effect is in...

Cambodia became dollarized suddenly in the early 1990s, as a result of massive dollar inflows stemming from a postconflict situation. Considering that the amount of dollars in circulation is unusually high, we attempt to estimate the true degree of dollarization empirically. Our results show...

The stylized fact that strong economic growth is usually accompanied with strong export growth leads many people to conclude that the export sector is the main driving force behind those episodes. The model in this paper, however, shows that the non-tradable sector may also generate high...

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is the most commonly used measure for assessing international competitiveness. We develop a methodology to estimate the REER that incorporates two distinctive elements that are not considered in the current literature and apply it to the Mediterranean...

International trade theory has pointed out that factor accumulation could immiserize a country if it is sufficiently biased toward the export sector, or if it is biased toward an importcompeting sector in the presence of tariff protection. This paper analyzes the impact of aid, in the form of an...

This survey of the recent literature asks: how important is trade policy for poverty reduction? We consider the effects of openness on poverty in two components: the effect of openness on average income growth, and the effect on distribution for a given growth rate. Evidence from a variety of...