This paper generalizes recent work for India which shows that the use of imported intermediates is associated with the creation of new product varieties by domestic firms. It uses firm-level data for 17 developing countries and 13 sectors to show that firms that source their inputs...

The paper addresses preferential trade agreements in Asia and the Pacific with the objective of identifying their characteristics which can be useful in assessing the effects of their implementation. The paper relies mostly on the Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Agreements Database (APTIAD) in...

This paper discusses the potential for cross-South Pacific trade between selected Southeast Asian and Latin American economies. The objective of this discussion is to identify obstacles for more intensive trade between the observed countries. Firstly, the paper reviews trends in trade flows and...

This paper examines the progress made so far in achieving the trade targets of Millennium Development Goal 8 (“Building a Global Partnership for Development”) with respect to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) of Asia and the Pacific. The paper uses data from the OECD, WTO and UNDP, among...

This paper examines the issue of measuring logistics costs from an applied trade policy research perspective, as well as identifying logistics-intensive sectors. It focuses on currently available data at the macro- and firm-levels. Data sources considered include national accounts, national...

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between regional trade integration and trade costs in services industries. The empirical analysis relies, on the one hand, on a dataset of theory-consistent bilateral trade costs calculated for 55 countries over the period 1999-2009 and, on the other...

Regulatory measures constitute a significant barrier to cross-border services trade in sectors including transport, communications, business services, insurance, and recreation. However, regulation has weaker effects on trade in financial services, distribution, and construction. Entry barriers...

This paper shows that the Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimator applied to the gravity model produces estimates in which, summing across all partners, actual and estimated total trade flows are identical. Other methods such as OLS do not have this desirable property. Indeed, Poisson is the...

This paper shows that export costs, tariffs, and international transport costs are all important determinants of geographical export diversification in a sample of 123 developing countries. A 10% reduction in any one of these factors produces a 5%-6% increase in the number of foreign markets...

The Kalman Filter is used to estimate a structural time-series model of cotton supply for 30 countries and 16 aggregated regions. Estimated short run supply elasticities with respect to the world price are presented for all 46 countries and regions. While they are broadly within the expected...