This edition of Global Trade Watch addresses three questions concerning recent trade developments: What is happening? Why? Does it matter? 2016 is the fifth consecutive year of sluggish trade growth and the year with the weakest trade performance since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial...

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was the first instance of countries adhering to take a collective action against global warming. More than 190 countries came forward and submitted their contributions in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, reflective of their ability and...

There is a large body of research that explores international trade as a source of the dispersion in income levels and growth performances across countries. The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950 and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of international trade....

This paper exploits information from two different datasets to provide a novel and multi-dimensional picture of the engagement of all sub-Saharan African countries in global value chains (GVCs). It documents in detail the nature of the underlying data and the way it is used to construct several...

Much micro-econometric evidence suggests that precipitation has wide ranging impacts on vital economic indicators such as agricultural yields, human capital, and even conflict. And yet paradoxically most macro-econometric evidence (especially in the climate economy literature) finds that...

This paper examines the labor market impacts of a large-scale marine environmental crisis caused by toxic chemical contamination in Vietnam's central coast in 2016. Combining labor force surveys with satellite data on fishing-boat detection, the analysis finds negative and heterogeneous impacts...