The authors study the link between export product variety and country productivity based on data from 34 industrial and developing countries, from 1982 to 1997. They measure export product variety by the share of U.S. imports on the set of goods exported by each sampled country relative to the...

Product variety plays an important role in the theoretical work on monopolistic competition and trade, and recent empirical work has begun to quantify this for aggregate and disaggregate import demands. The authors discuss the measurement of product variety in trade, using a broad cross-section...

Trade liberalizations have been shown to improve domestic firms'performance through the new varieties of imported intermediate inputs. This paper uses a unique, representative sample of Bangladeshi garment firms to highlight that local intermediate inputs may also enhance domestic...

Productivity, and the Rybczynski effects of factor endowments, have been highlighted as the two main reasons behind the growth of newly industrializing economies in East Asia. However, empirical studies at the aggregate level, do not find support for these claims. Focusing on Singapore's...

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree of...

Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries (called Annex I countries) have to reduce their combined emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels in the first commitment period of 2008-12. Efforts to reduce emissions to meet Kyoto targets and beyond have raised issues of competitiveness in...

To understand the role of trade policies in the crisis of 2008, this paper constructs the overall trade restrictiveness indices for a wide range of countries using their tariff schedules in 2008 and 2009. The index summarizes the trade policy stance of a country, taking into account the share of...

The past three and a half decades witnessed a distinctly declining trend in Singapore's unemployment rate, which dropped from an average annual rate of 7.85 percent in 1966-70 to 2.74 percent in 1991-2000. The authors seek to identify and empirically examine the factors that have influenced...

The results of this paper challenge the conventional wisdom in the literature that productivity plays no role in the economic development of Singapore. Properly accounting for market power and returns to scale technology, the estimated average productivity growth is twice as large as the...

Actual, and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. The authors develop a simple model that shows that the effects of new entry, and import competition on industry price-cost markups, depend on country size. The authors...