This paper shows how a developing country, Lao PDR, imports high glutinous rice prices by exporting its staple food to neighboring countries, Vietnam and Thailand. Lao PDR has extensive export controls on rice, generating a sizable difference between domestic and international prices. Controls...

This paper examines the effects of robotization on trade patterns, wages and welfare. It develops a Ricardian model with two-stage production and trade in intermediate and final goods in which robots can take over some tasks previously performed by humans in a subset of industries. An increase...

Traditional weighted-average measures of trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with much more detailed...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's trade performance over the past two decades has been disappointing. Efforts to boost trade through a plethora of regional trade agreements (RTAs) are underway. This study examines the potential contribution of regional trade agreements, as well as...

There is substantial evidence that with the progressive global decline in tariffs over several decades, trade costs are a more significant barrier to trade than tariffs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper decomposes trade costs into three categories: costs that can be lowered by trade...

A data set of key macro-sustainability indicators, constructed after several fact-finding missions, and World Bank methodologies on estimating wealth accounting are used to study Mauritania's wealth, which is estimated to be between USD50 and USD60 billion. The country's produced wealth...

This paper shows that the welfare of a country's representative consumer can be measured using just two variables: current and future total factor productivity and the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences...

Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on...

Global poverty is becoming increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and among households engaged in subsistence agriculture in environments characterized by uncertainty. Understanding how to achieve sustainable increases in household incomes in this context is key to ending extreme...

The long-term effects of Mexico's conditional cash transfer program, PROSPERA, on poor households are of great interest to policy makers and academics alike. This paper analyzes the long-term effects on the welfare of the original participant households and their offspring, about 20 years after...