The burst of the Japanese financial bubble in the early 1990s has increased the bad debts of Japan's financial institutions. Japan accounts for about 20 percent of foreign aid to developing countries and for 10 percent of their exports, so Japan's economic health is important. The authors...

This paper provides a forward-looking view of trade and its relevance for Lesotho?s medium- and long-term development. It does this through computable general equilibrium analysis of potential impacts based on specific trade-related scenarios. The scenarios include the potential loss of American...

Standards and technical regulations are an increasingly prominent part of the international trade policy debate. In particular, there has been considerable discussion of whether standards and regulations affect trade costs and export prospects for developing countries. In this paper the authors...

The authors create a standards restrictiveness index using newly available data on maximum residue levels of pesticides for 61 importing countries. The paper analyzes the impact that food safety standards have on international trade of agricultural products. The findings suggest that more...

Using a new database on Chinese food standards, this paper estimates the impact of volunta-ry and mandatory standards on its agricultural and food exports. The dataset covers seven Chinese products from 1992 to 2008. The findings here indicate that standards have a posi-tive effect on China's...

This paper evaluates the impact of foreign aid to five service sectors (transportation, information and communications technologies, energy, banking/financial services, and business services) on exports of downstream manufacturing sectors in developing countries. To address the reverse causality...

This paper proposes a new framework to analyze aid effectiveness. Using World Bank firm survey data and OECD aid flow data, the authors analyze whether aid targets areas that firms in developing countries have identified as obstacles for their growth and whether aid actually improves firms'...

Private inspection of international shipments has been used over the last half-century for a variety of purposes. These include prevention of capital flight and improvement of import duty collection, among others. The existing literature has failed to find much impact of these inspection...

Since 2005, donors and development agencies have increased the overall value of aid for trade and put in place several mechanisms to channel such aid and to ensure that it targets national priorities. This paper reviews recent trends in the allocation of aid for trade and analyses of its...

The authors estimate the impact of aggregate indicators of "soft" and "hard" infrastructure on the export performance of developing countries. They build four new indicators for 101 countries over the period 2004-07. Estimates show that trade facilitation reforms do improve the export...