As a landlocked country in East Africa, Uganda faces two major disadvantages concerning access to foreign markets. It does not have an immediate gateway to low-cost ocean transport, but first has to pass its imports and exports through neighboring countries by road or rail. Nor does it share a...

This paper reviews the trade policy situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) and identifies a number of key issues and challenges for the country. The focus of the study is thereby on how trade taxes and quantitative restrictions affect the goods sector. The analysis falls into three...

Nigeria’s trade policy is at a crucial turning point. Historically, the country has had a very restrictive import regime that generated substantial transfers to domestic producers and strong anti-export bias. Yet, in its current poverty reduction strategy, Nigeria identified deeper trade...

Over the past two decades, Tanzania has embarked on a marked liberalization of its trade regime. The Government wants this reform process to continue and sees international integration at the global and regional level as a means to achieve higher economic efficiency, productivity and...

Morocco’s trade policy is at a cross-roads. Historically, the country has had a very restrictive import regime that generated substantial transfers to domestic producers. In terms of the simple average of most-favored nation tariffs, Morocco is one of the ten most highly protected markets in...

This paper investigates a specific aspect of international production linkages that, following Hummels et al. (2001), is commonly designated as vertical specialization (VS) - the use of imported inputs to produce goods that are afterwards exported. We propose a relative measure of VS-based trade...

For many in Latin America, the increasing participation of China and India in international markets is seen as a looming shadow of two ‘mighty giants’ on the region’s manufacturing sector. Are they really mighty giants when it comes to their impact on manufacturing employment? This paper...

This paper analyses the relevance and the characteristics of the international fragmentation of production in the Portuguese economy. The empirical trade literature suggests different measures of fragmentation, changing the scope of the concept and using alternative sets of information. The...

Recent literature has focused on the importance of extensive and intensive margins of trade in the case of the Euro adoption. Using a unique dataset taken from ISTAT firm level data, we study the effects of euro introduction on Italian manufacturing firms. We focus our analysis on the period...

The dissertation examines the development of the global direction of the EU Common commercial policy (CCP) in the period 2000-2009. The prerequisites for the global direction becoming a leading one are identified – economic globalization, accelerated development of the global trade, the new...