Despite enormous academic interest in international trade costs and keen policy interest in efforts to mitigate them, so far there is very little hard evidence on the impacts of trade facilitation efforts. This paper exploits a dramatic reduction in the rate of physical inspections by Albanian...

In the last decade Morocco undertook substantial, if gradual, trade liberalization by reducing tariffs, reforming trade regulations and signing free and preferential trade agreements with several regions and countries, including the United States, Turkey, the European Union and Arab countries....

The Russian tariff structure contains over 11,000 tariff lines of which about 1,700 use the so-called "combined" tariff rate system. For the combined system tariff lines, the actual tariff applied by Russian customs is the maximum of the ad valorem or specific tariff. The lack of available data...

The authors provide new evidence on the impacts of trade reforms on wages and wage inequality in developing countries. While most of the current literature on the topic achieves identification by comparing outcomes before and after one episode of trade liberalization across industries, they...

Four West African nations have demanded that the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda include a Cotton Initiative that involves two issues: cutting cotton subsidies and tariffs, and assisting farm productivity growth in Africa. The authors provide estimates of the potential...

An important issue in multilateral trade negotiations is the approach taken to reduce tariffs. The authors believe that there are important advantages in formula approaches and survey a range of options between the sharply top-down Swiss formula and proportional cuts in tariffs. Over the range...

Many countries use duty drawbacks on exports, yet they have been given little attention in the literature and there is no consensus whether countries should embrace or abandon them. The author asserts that the answer depends on a country s development priorities and economic conditions. An...

What does the macroeconomy look like in the aftermath of tariff changes This paper estimates impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963-2014. Tariff increases are associated with persistent, economically and statistically...

The relationships between trade facilitation, trade flows, and capacity building are complex and challenging to assess, both empirically and in implementation. The authors measure and estimate the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows across 75 countries in global trade,...

Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent,...