This paper discusses the results of a survey of multinational corporations with affiliates in developing countries. The paper explores corporate perspectives and decision making across the stages of the investment cycle: attraction, entry and establishment, operations and expansion, linkages...

Existing work on China's economic influence in Africa refers to Africa in broad terms, thereby generalizing the results to an extent that is unhelpful for policy-makers in a specific country. Moreover, the emphasis is on oil exporters. This paper remedies this by focusing on a single,...

This paper assesses the impact that a potential liberalization of sugar regimes in OECD countries could have on household labor income and poverty in Brazil. The authors first estimate the extent of price transmission from world markets to 11 Brazilian states to capture the fact that some local...

Four West African nations have demanded that the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda include a Cotton Initiative that involves two issues: cutting cotton subsidies and tariffs, and assisting farm productivity growth in Africa. The authors provide estimates of the potential...

Current coffee prices are at record lows and below the cost of production for many producers in Central America. Moreover, the coffee crisis is structural, and changes in supply and demand do not indicate a quick recovery of prices. So, coffee producers in Central America are facing new...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...

This paper takes a first look at the trade effects of China's Belt and Road Initiative, also referred to as the New Silk Road, on the 71 countries potentially involved. The initiative consists of several infrastructure investment projects to improve the land and maritime transportation in the...

A growing body of work has shown that the quality of national institutions that enforce written contracts plays an important role in shaping a country's comparative advantage. Using highly disaggregated bilateral and unique harmonized firm-level trade data across a large number of countries,...

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 study examines the importance of enhancing the cross-border transmission interconnections and regional electricity trade to promote hydropower in the South Asia region and quantifies the potential of hydropower development and trade under alternative scenarios. While South Asia is endowed...