Increasing the trade integration of developing countries can make a vital contribution to boosting shared prosperity, but it also exposes producers and consumers to exogenous shocks that alter relative prices, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. This paper discusses the short-run...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

Deepening real and financial integration of developing countries into the world economy has prompted renewed interest in the contribution of external shocks to their macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper revisits the issue using four decades of annual data for a large sample of developing...

The authors use newly collected data on trade and production in 178 countries to infer estimates of trade costs in agriculture and manufactured goods for the 1995-2010 period. The data show that trade costs are strongly declining in per capita income. Moreover, the rate of change of trade costs...

This paper examines the role of the public sector in providing additional information to exporters in developing countries as they seek to monitor and keep open their access to foreign markets by using the rules of the WTO system. It highlights new information generation and dissemination...

The "distance effect" measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the "distance puzzle" . This paper reviews the evidence and explanations. Using an extensive data set of...

This paper studies the impact of transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to estimate shipment times before...

This paper examines the patterns and economic effects of foreign direct investment across the Belt and Road Initiative countries and assesses the potential role of the initiative in shaping the patterns and effects. Exploring cross-country bilateral transportation cost and foreign investment...

Decades of services trade negotiations have produced a plethora of rules and commitments but limited real liberalization. One reason is a form of "negotiating tunnel vision," which has led to a focus on reciprocal market opening rather than on creating the regulatory preconditions for...

China's Belt and Road Initiative aims to improve connectivity between China and more than 70 countries through infrastructure investment and regional cooperation. The initiative has the potential to accelerate significantly the rate of economic integration and development in the region, as trade...