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...

Is the variation in bilateral trade flows across countries primarily due to differences in the number of exporting firms (the extensive margin) or in the average size of an exporter (the intensive margin)? And how does this affect the estimation and quantitative implications of the Melitz (2003)...

This paper aims at assessing the impact of migration on export performance and more particularly the effect of African migrants on African trade. Relying on a new data set on international bilateral migration recently released by the World Bank spanning from 1980 to 2010, the authors estimate a...

In the 2000s, global inequality fell for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, driven by a decline in the dispersion of average incomes across countries. Between 1988 and 2008, a period of rapidly increasing global integration, income growth was largest for the global top 1 percent and...

This paper documents an unusual and possibly significant phenomenon: The export of skills embodied in goods, services, or capital from poorer to richer countries. We first present a set of stylized facts. Using a measure that combines the sophistication of a country's exports with the average...

This paper examines the performance of globally engaged firms in Argentina in the past decade. Using highly disaggregated firm-level customs transaction data for imports and exports, the paper documents the progressive retreat of Argentine firms from global markets. Between 2007 and 2017, the...

This study examines whether foreign direct investment inflows facilitate upgrading of export quality in host countries. The analysis focuses on the Russian Federation and uses customs data merged with firm-level information from Orbis. The results show a positive relationship between the quality...

This paper studies how a positive export shock -- the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) -- spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, the authors instrument export...

This paper examines the effect of energy costs on industry export competitiveness. Most studies in the literature use direct energy consumption (energy consumption at the final stage of production) and domestic energy prices to compute energy costs faced by domestic industries. Using...

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 --...