This working paper assesses cross-border economic integration in the Lower Congo region. It focuses on the Kinshasa-Brazzaville conurbation, which is projected to become Africa's largest urban area by 2025, and is already serving as the gateway to large hinterlands. Despite their size and...

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...

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 focus of trade policy has shifted in recent years from economy-wide reductions in tariffs and trade restrictions toward targeted interventions to facilitate trade and promote exports. Most of these latter interventions are based on the new mantra of "aid-for-trade" rather than on hard...

Contrary to the prevailing view that the Doha negotiations have achieved little, the authors find that on trade facilitation much progress has been made. This is particularly true in regard to action by development banks and bilateral development agencies to meet client demand for assistance in...

This paper estimates the impacts on The Philippines of deep integration in a modern mega-preferential trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The paper assesses how the results differ with three versions of market structure: (i) perfect competition, Armington style; (ii)...

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 examines the relationship between openness and within-country regional inequality across 28 countries over the period 1975-2005, paying special attention to whether increases in global trade affect the developed and developing world differently. Using a combination of static and...

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...

This paper contributes to the predominant diversification debate that has been ongoing in Trinidad and Tobago for more than three decades. The paper makes a determination of the key impediments to the country's attempts at diversification. Econometric techniques are applied on panel data to...