This study explores the potential for South Africa to become an engine for intra- regional trade and industrial development by linking other Southern African countries to its global value chains and, in the process, improving its global trade competitiveness. The study identifies 'lead products'...

There exist a plethora of developing country value chain studies based on a variety of methodological approaches, both in the academic literature and through policy reports. However, there has been little systematic synthesis of the findings and approaches taken in these studies. This study...

Digitalization and shifting patterns of globalization are fast changing the rules of the game for countries embarking on a path of industrialization. In this study, we empirically examine the impact of digitalization and global value chains on structural transformation using a cross-country...

The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms' trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular, using a unique database on the population of...

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) between the European Union (EU) and trade partners go far beyond mere elimination of tariffs to include such diverse issues as non-tariff barriers, competition legislation, investment protection, and more. Implementing such provisions requires deep institutional and...

As a sovereign country, Mozambique initially relied on international solidarity and managed its donor relations well. Donor dependency entailed some loss of agency for the government as it allowed donors to challenge its capacity but never its authority. However, in the last decade, donor...

This paper presents a review of recent studies that estimate the trade effects of foreign aid. It also provides new results obtained using panel data techniques to estimate the direct effects of aid on international trade, accounting for countries' participation in free trade agreements, and the...

This paper outlines the contours of global economic development, since 1980, to analyse underlying factors and consider future implications. The increased economic significance of developing countries, reflected in their share of world output, manufacturing and trade, is striking. But...

How does international trade affect structural transformation in developing countries? We use data on sectoral allocation of labour and value-added in 46 developing economies over the period 1995-2017 and exploit for identification plausibly exogenous variation in manufacturing imports from...

The animal feed to poultry value chain in the southern African region has seen rapid demand growth owing to increases in urbanization. This growth has been accompanied by the increase in co-ordinated investments by large, predominantly South African, firms across the region. We examine the...