A key characteristic of any trade bloc is its “flexibility” – the extent to which it can be modified or augmented by existing members. This paper investigates how prospective trade bloc members value the flexibility of proposed trade agreements in a changing trading environment. We...

Recent work by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) establishes an empirical modeling strategy which takes full account of the structural, non-(log-)linear impact of trade barriers on trade in new trade theory models. Structural new trade theory models have never been used to evaluate and quantify...

Despite the growing political priority given to making trade work for the majority in Latin America, a notable gap exists in the knowledge about the distributive impacts of trade integration. This study attempts to fill this gap: it surveys the most recent contributions to the mainstream trade...

The auto sector in Pakistan has been a persistent opponent of trade liberalisation in the country. This has entailed losses to consumers in terms of higher prices, low safety and quality standards, and lack of innovation in this sector. The deletion programme, which was to result in...

This paper attempts to evaluate the possible gains and losses arising from the gradual opening up of pharmaceutical trade between India and Pakistan. We explain the comparative advantages of both countries at a disaggregated level, followed by a qualitative analysis of various perceptions and...

The comparison of the key features of trade integration processes and the economic outcomes in China and India reveals that while much has already been achieved in both these economies, the Chinese reforms, especially with respect to manufacturing trade, have gone further and that this is likely...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relationship between patterns of integration in global value chains (GVCs), the ‘quality’ of such integration in terms of technological capabilities and the structure of employment in European countries and sectors. We study employment shares in...

This paper uses data on policy measures affecting services operation and trade to document and estimate the impact of different types of policy measures on services exports and imports, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. It finds that market-entry measures are important to both...

The world economy is increasingly shaped by cross-border production and investment activity. The paper uses complex network analysis along with panel data econometric techniques to study the structure and interactions between the networks of global value chains (GVC) and foreign direct...

In this paper we provide a method to characterise global value chains and a related decomposition of bilateral gross exports by distinguishing three different stages of the value-added flows: (i) the source of value added, (ii) the final assembly stage of a product, and (iii) the final...