This paper provides a thematic summary of a seminar hosted by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Canada, on 17 February 2005. The seminar addressed five themes: (a) the scope and intended benefits of North–South Regional Trade Agreements involving Asia, Africa, and...

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...

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...

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 note seeks to shed light on how economies develop by reconciling the apparent conflict between diversification and specialization as the path to development, and alternative conceptions of an economy as an equilibrium system of optimizing agents versus a driven system dependent on...

Participation in the modern, globalized economy necessarily entails some degree of economy-level specialization in terms of the relative intensities of activities, since all economies – and especially developing ones – are small relative to the global economy. At the same time, it has been...

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...

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 takes up the question of whether market concerns about global imbalances in general, and the US external deficit in particular, are well founded. It reviews four arguments bearing on how concerned we should be about the widening of the US current account deficit since the Asian...

For Japan, the 1990s was a lost decade. What caused Japan's star to fall so low, so fast? Most analyses of Japan's economic malaise since the 1990s emphasize domestic factors. The main arguments blame the non-performing loan problem in the banking sector and/or Japan having slipped into a...