This paper assesses the potential impacts of services trade liberalisation for a sample of African countries. The focus is on the relationship between labour productivity of manufacturing sectors and two types of services trade-related policies – restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI)...

September 1995 The countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have lost the geographic advantage they used to have because of their proximity to the European Union at a time when Eastern Europe was effectively closed to open exchange with the West. The Central and Eastern European...

This paper surveys the major options that have been proposed concerning a possible agreement on trade-related anti-trust principles and evaluates both their desirability and feasibility. Three criteria are used to evaluate the options: (i) the extent to which they enhance the contestability of...

High levels of protection and domestic support for farmers in industrial countries significantly affect many developing countries, both directly and through the price-depressing effect of agricultural support policies. High tariffs - in both rich and poor countries - and domestic support may...

Following the onset of the financial crisis in September 2008 and the subsequent “Great Trade Collapse” (Baldwin 2009), many countries actively used trade policy instruments as part of their response to the global recession. Governments pursued a mix of trade liberalization, trade promotion,...

This paper briefly reviews new indices of trade restrictiveness and trade facilitation that have been developed at the World Bank. The paper also compares the trade impact of different types of trade restrictions applied at the border with the effects of domestic policies that affect trade...