Can the clothing sector be a driver of export diversification and growth for today's low-income countries as it was in the past for countries that have graduated into middle income? This paper assesses this issue taking into account key changes to the market for clothing: the emergence of India...

This paper examines recent changes in the structure of Argentine exports and the implications for future growth. The authors find that the current export structure of Argentina is not conducive to future growth because it is dominated by low-productivity goods that tend to be exported by...

Madagascar's textile and apparel industry has been among the fastest growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fueled by low labor costs, a fairly productive labor force, and preferential access to industrial countries, Madagascar's exports of textile and apparel products grew from about US $45 million in...

This paper examines systematically the growth effects of trade integration in Sub-Saharan Africa. It complements and improves upon the empirical literature in two aspects: first, it jointly estimates the impact of different dimensions of trade integration, namely, trade volumes, export/trade...

This paper uses the dramatic expansion of access to the Internet in China to analyze the impact of the Internet on firm performance. The paper combines firm-level production data with province-level information on Internet penetration to examine how the rollout of the Internet across Chinese...

Interest in assessing the impacts on developing countries of changes in major markets' economic performance has risen in tandem with global economic uncertainty over short- and medium-term growth prospects. This paper proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country's exports to...

Like many emerging economies, South Africa has identified exports as an engine for more inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth did not follow the substantial export growth that South Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper uses a newly developed World Bank database --...

This paper evaluates the impact of market-oriented structural reforms, in particular labor market policies, social assistance programs, and trade liberalization on long run unemployment, wage inequality, and the distribution of employment across sectors in a small open economy with search...

This paper aims to document a set of stylized facts characterizing business cycle dynamics in smaller economies. The paper uses a large sample of countries spanning 1960-2014 to show that country size is a significant factor affecting countries' volatility, comovement with gross domestic product...

Do sources of volatility differ by country characteristics such as the level of development, country size, quality of institutions, and presence of restrictions on fiscal policy? This paper sets out to answer this question in a quarterly panel of 48 developed and developing countries for...