This paper explores various strategic options available to Japanese firms faced with the increasing market pressures in the global economy. Whether Japanese firms are able to retain the competitive edge will depend on the continuing gains in their manufacturing capability, their capacity to...

Using firm-level data on manufacturing sectors in Africa, this paper addresses how domestic supply constraints and other firm characteristics explain the geographical orientation of firms' exports and the overall market diversification of African manufacturing exports. The degree of market...

The differences in the levels of financial development between advanced and developing countries are large and persistent. Theoretical and empirical literature has argued that these differences are the source of comparative advantage and could therefore shape trade patterns. This paper points...

The aim of this paper is to assess the possible impacts of the Doha Round of negotiations on poverty in Cameroon. During the recent period of economic recovery, Cameroon has enjoyed a sharp decline in poverty with the headcount index falling from 53.3 percent of inhabitants in 1996 to 40.2...

This paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also...

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 focuses on the sluggish growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an error correction model to assess whether the global trade slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the relationship between trade and...

This paper assesses the impact of the rise of China on the trade of Latin American and Caribbean economies. The study proposes an index to measure the impact on trade, which suggests sizable effects, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay. The paper uses the index...

This paper explores the economic impacts of two related tracks of China's expected transformation?economic slowdown and rebalancing away from investment toward consumption?and estimates the spillovers for the rest of the world, with a special focus on Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper...

This paper shows new empirical regularities indicating that the structure of trade connections affects the trade-growth nexus. System generalized method of moments estimations indicate that key structural features associated with the composition of traded products and partners matter for growth....