This article empirically analyzes the role of finance in economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa from the perspective of what is termed herein “financial permeation”. By estimating panel data on 37 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa between 2004 and 2010, we examine whether financial permeation...

This paper uses data on 11 industries in 85 developing countries to show that trade times matter for import and export performance at the firm-level. Firms import more intermediate inputs if import licensing times are shorter. They export more of their production if border clearance times are...

The WTO’s new Agreement on Trade Facilitation (ATF) will help to reverse the region’s deceleration of overall export growth and, when implemented, could add as much as 3 percent to regional GDP and lift employment across the region by 1.2 percent. In the region’s developing economies,...

Although there are numerous empirical studies on the effect of trade facilitation on international trade and GDP, there have been no studies on the association between trade facilitation and poverty as well as inequality. This paper examines this association in low and middle income countries...

The World Trade Organization’s new Agreement on Trade Facilitation has the potential to significantly reduce East Asia’s trade costs along the entire supply chain, increasing regional gross domestic product (GDP) by 2.7 percent and employment by 1.2 percent. At present, the region’s...

This paper has examined the implications of SAFTA for the South Asian countries. In doing so it has reviewed the pattern of intra-regional trade in South Asia. The paper has reviewed a number of studies which conducted qualitative and quantitative assessments of SAFTA. Using the global general...

LDCs' trade patterns changed in the past decade, thanks to the rebalancing of global demand towards large emerging countries and the resulting cycle of high international commodity prices. This process led to a wider geographical diversification of LDCs' exports but contributed also to a greater...

This paper shows that there are significant prospects of rise in intra-regional trade among the four Eastern South Asian countries. The partial equilibrium modelling exercise helps identify the products with high export potentiality. Simulation exercise based on a global general equilibrium...

This paper attempts to identify the logistics impediment in trade between India and Nepal based on indepth field visits.

The expansion of regional economic cooperation was one of the major developments in the world political economy after the Second World War. Factors that thrust countries closer were both economic and political but economic factors prevailed; the classic example was the EU and ASEAN where economic...