International consultants on bank regulation, and supervision for developing countries, often base their advice on how their home country does things, for lack of information on practice in other countries. Recommendations for reform have tended to be shaped by bias rather than facts. To better...

The objective of this paper is to provide indicators of trade restrictiveness that include both measures of tariff and nontariff barriers for 91 developing and industrial countries. For each country, the authors estimate three trade restrictiveness indices. The first one summarizes the degree of...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam, rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries (called Annex I countries) have to reduce their combined emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels in the first commitment period of 2008-12. Efforts to reduce emissions to meet Kyoto targets and beyond have raised issues of competitiveness in...

To understand the role of trade policies in the crisis of 2008, this paper constructs the overall trade restrictiveness indices for a wide range of countries using their tariff schedules in 2008 and 2009. The index summarizes the trade policy stance of a country, taking into account the share of...

Trade liberalizations have been shown to improve domestic firms' performance through the new varieties of imported intermediate inputs. This paper uses a unique, representative sample of Bangladeshi garment firms to highlight that local intermediate inputs may also enhance domestic firms'...

The short-term impact of Brexit on goods exports is assessed using the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Index of the United Kingdom's major trading partners. The analysis shows that in the short run, leaving the European Union may cause the United Kingdom's exports to the European Union to decrease...

China has defied the declining trend in domestic content in exports in many countries. This paper studies China?s rising domestic content in exports using firm- and customs transaction-level data. The approach embraces firm heterogeneity and hence reduces aggregation bias. The study finds that...

This paper builds a tractable partial equilibrium model to help explain the role of trade preferences given to developing countries, as well as the efficacy of various subsidy policies. The model allows for firm level heterogeneity in demand and productivity and lets the mass of firms that enter...