This paper describes seven salient features of trade integration in the 21st century: Trade integration has been more rapid than ever (hyperglobalization); it is dematerialized, with the growing importance of services trade; it is democratic, because openness has been embraced widely; it is...

This paper estimates the impact of China’s exchange rate changes on exports of competitor countries in third markets, known as the “spillover effect.” Recent theory is used to develop an identification strategy in which competition between China and its developing country competitors in...

Against the backdrop of the recent financial crisis and the ongoing rapid changes in the world economy, the fate of the dollar as the premier international reserve currency is under scrutiny. This paper attempts to answer whether the Chinese renminbi will eclipse the dollar, what will be the...

There is growing clamor in industrial countries for additional border taxes on imports from countries with lower carbon prices. While this paper confirms the findings of other research that unilateral emissions cuts by industrial countries will have minimal carbon leakage effects, output and...

This paper documents an unusual and possibly significant phenomenon: the export of skills embodied in goods, services, or capital from poorer to richer countries. We first present a set of stylized facts. Using a measure that combines the sophistication of a country’s exports with the average...

Two aspects of global imbalances--undervalued exchange rates and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs--require a multilateral response. For reasons of inadequate leverage and eroding legitimacy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has not been effective in dealing with undervalued exchange rates. We...

A country’s rise to economic dominance tends to be accompanied by its currency becoming a reference point, with other currencies tracking it implicitly or explicitly. For a sample comprising emerging-market economies, we show that in the last three years, the renminbi (RMB) has increasingly...

This paper marks the first attempt at examining the growth performance across Indian states for the 2000s, a period also marked by the global financial crisis. Four key findings are reported. First, consistent with the fact that the 2000s was the best ever decade for Indian macroeconomic...

Prima facie, competitiveness adjustments in the eurozone, based on unit labor cost developments, appear sensible and in line with what the economic analyst might have predicted and the economic doctor might have ordered. But a broader and arguably better--Balassa-Samuelson-Penn (BSP)--framework...

A fundamental shift is taking place in the world economy to which the multilateral trading system has failed to adapt. The Doha process focused on issues of limited significance while the burning issues of the day were not even on the negotiating agenda. This paper advances five propositions:...