The first issue we study is the impact of transport costs on the volume and nature of international trade.  To what extent has the rise in international trade been driven by changes in transport costs?  Why is cross-country and cross-regional experience so different?  Transport costs also...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

This paper constructs country-level aggregates of trade facilitation measures from firm-level responses in the Enterprise Surveys and compares them with the Doing Business indicators, the Logistics Performance Index and the Enabling Trade Index.  Correlations between the data sources are low...

Do better trade logistics reduce trade costs, raising a country's exports?  Yes, but the magnitude of the effect depends on country size.  Applying a new gravity model to a comprehensive logistics index, we find that an average-sized country would raise exports by about 46% after a...

We present a gravity model that accounts for multilateral resistance, firm heterogeneity and country-selection into trade, while accommodating asymmetries in trade flows.  A new equation for the proportion of exporting firms takes a gravity form: the extensive margin is also affected by...

Commentators claim that a shortage of skills in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes or implies skilled and unskilled labour are complements. Hicks Elasticities of Complementarity and elasticities of factor price...

An industry in decline provides an appropriate setting for the theory that mergers and acquisitions destroy implicit contracts and allow for the shedding of excess labour. We test this theory using provincial data from the South African gold mining industry, which has been in decline over the...

Do Southern African Development Community countries trade enough with each other and with the rest of the world? Although its share of world trade has fallen, appropriate benchmarking shows that, controlling for gross domestic product and other characteristics, Southern African Development...

Free trade agreements lead to a rise in bilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories are developed or developing countries. Furthermore, the percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. In this paper, the results are robust...

Do better international logistics reduce trade costs, raising a developing country's exports? Yes, but the magnitude of the effect depends on the country's size. The authors apply a gravity model that accounts for firm heterogeneity and multilateral resistance to a comprehensive new...