This paper analyzes the impacts of selected trade facilitation measures on international trade flows. A gravity model is used to estimate four equations: a pooled cross-section model; a fixed-effects model; a random effects model; and a Poisson maximum likelihood estimator. The contribution of...

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...

Would improvements in port performance increase trade in countries on the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans? Previous studies attempted to answer this question using ad hoc measures of port efficiency that do not control for the actual use of port assets or measures that can be very noisy. To...

The authors develop a framework for studying trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated products. In their model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good and make a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution...

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 provides up-to-date characterization of the association between trade and GDP comovement -- also called the trade comovement slope -- for 150 countries from 1962 to 2011. The paper shows that trade is significantly linked to more GDP correlation, either directly through bilateral...

Since the Global Financial Crisis, world trade growth has been subdued and lagging slightly behind growth of gross domestic product. Trade is growing more slowly not only because growth of global gross domestic product is lower, but also because trade itself has become less responsive to gross...

In the 1990s the mainstream consensus was that trade causes growth. Subsequent research shed doubt on the consensus view, as evidence suggested that the identification of the effect of trade on growth was problematic in the existing literature. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing...