Ethiopia set out – and in large measure achieved – a very ambitious program of economic and social development under its Growth and Transformation Plan I. The scale of public sector involvement was very large: for the five-year Plan period, it called for budgetary government spending and...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don't trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

“Government-to-government” relations, underpinned by high-level Canadian representation in foreign nations, such as an embassy, significantly boost the level of Canadian exports to those countries, according to a new C. D. Howe Institute report. In the study, entitled “The Impact of...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don`t trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

This paper explores the implications of recent developments in firm-based trade theory and empirics for trade policy and negotiations. While traditional trade theory focused on the country, and the new trade theory of the 1980’s adopted the industry as the unit for analysis, the newest theory...

China’s WTO accession was a landmark event bringing one of the world’s major trading economies fully into the international rules-based system. The major features and implications of China’s accession agreement are reviewed and, given China’s success in trade and investment outside the...

The accelerated expansion of China’s trade and current account surpluses since 2004, and the associated expansion of China’s foreign exchange reserves in the context of very rapid investment-driven domestic economic growth and adverse movements in China’s terms of trade have led China’s...

On March 2-3, 2006, a group of leading observers of the international trade and investment scene gathered in Ottawa for an informal discussion of the prospects for the Doha Development Agenda in view of the progress in negotiations made at the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade...

Are exports systematically associated with diplomatic representation abroad? Given the expenses of maintaining posts abroad, this question is obviously of deep interest to governments seeking to promote their country's export performance while coping with budgetary pressures. In a recent...

On February 17-18, 2005, the Centre for International Governance Innovation at the University of Waterloo and the International Development Research Centre, in co-ordination with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade convened an informal meeting of leading observers of the...