This paper investigates the determinants of sustained accelerations in goods and services exports. Strong predictors of export takeoffs include domestic and structural indicators such as lower macroeconomic uncertainty, improved quality of institutions, a depreciated exchange rate, and...

Global merchandise trade expanded rapidly over the last 6 1\2 decades and its relationship with global income has seen ebbs and flows. This paper examines the shifts in this relationship using time series data over 1950-2014 and situates it in the current and longer term context. The...

Under a federal system of government, the division of responsibilities between the federal, provincial/state, and local levels of government may create internal barriers to trade. To deal with this problem, the federal and provincial governments in Canada established the Agreement on Internal...

This paper develops a new empirical framework for analyzing the dynamics of the trade balance in response to different types of macroeconomic shocks. The model provides a synthetic perspective on the conditional correlations between the business cycle and the trade balance that are generated by...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

This paper reviews controversies regarding linkage of international trade and labor standards. Pressures for international harmonization of labor standards arise in the context of increased trade between countries with large disparities in wages, and also reflect the history of labor standards....