Previous work has shown that firms in low and middle-income countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that feel greater pressure to innovate from their competitors are more likely to introduce new products and services than firms that do not feel pressure (Carlin and others 2001; World Bank...

This paper assesses the impact of internal infrastructure and landlockedness on Central Asian trade using a panel gravity equation estimated on a large sample of countries (167 countries over 1992-2004). The panel structure of the dataset makes it possible to control for country-pair specific...

Insurance market activity, both as a financial intermediary and a provider of risk transfer and indemnification, may contribute to economic growth by allowing different risks to be managed more efficiently and by mobilizing domestic savings. During the past decade, there has been faster growth...

The worldwide slowdown in growth after 1975 was a major negative fiscal shock. Slower growth lowers the present value of tax revenues and primary surpluses and thus makes a given level of debt more burdensome. Most countries failed to adjust to the negative fiscal consequences of the growth...

If one region of the world switches its research effort from dirty to clean technologies, will other regions follow To investigate this question, this paper builds a North-South model that combines insights from directed technological change and quality-ladder endogenous growth models with...

This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade...

This paper provides new estimates of the global gains from multilateral trade reform and their distribution among developing countries in the presence of trade preferences. Particular attention is given to agriculture, as farmers constitute the poorest households in developing countries but are...

The authors examine the effects of WTO agreements and domestic trade policy reforms on production, welfare, and poverty in Bangladesh. They use a sequential dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which takes into account accumulation effects, allowing for long-run analysis. The...

The study presents a comprehensive review of developing country trade policies and market access issues as they evolved over the period 1990-2012. The main findings are, first, that applied tariffs as well as traditional core non-tariff measures have declined significantly over time in both...

The author examines the impact of various trade policies for small developing states in the face of changing international trends - including globalization, the proliferation of regional integration agreements, the changing relationship between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries and...