As the economic crisis deepens and widens, fears of a return to the protectionist spiral of the 1930s become more common. However, an important difference between the 1930s and today is the existence of the World Trade Organization and the legal limits it imposes on the protectionist responses...

The number of national export promotion agencies has tripled over the past two decades. Although more countries made them part of their export strategy, studies criticized their efficacy in developing countries. The agencies were retooled, partly in response to these critiques. This paper...

This paper explores the impact of the emergence of China and India on foreign capital stocks in other economies. Using bilateral data from 1990-2003 and drawing from the knowledge-capital model of the multinational enterprises to control for fundamental determinants of foreign capital stocks...

Actual, and potential competition is a powerful source of discipline on the pricing behavior of firms with market power. The authors develop a simple model that shows that the effects of new entry, and import competition on industry price-cost markups, depend on country size. The authors...

Using a political economy approach, the authors analyze the pattern of protection in Mexico's manufacturing sector during the period of trade policy reforms (1985-89), when Mexico experienced significant trade liberalization and an important inflow of foreign direct investment. They take into...

In spite of the growing concerns about foreign direct investment being diverted from Latin America to China and India, the best available data show that Latin America has performed relatively well since 1997. Foreign capital stocks from OECD countries and the United States in particular in China...

This paper builds on theoretical predictions that show that gains from regional integration are unevenly distributed between resource rich and poor countries. It explores the effects of different integration schemes in the Middle East and North Africa. The results suggest that within the Pan...

This paper compares the impact of distance, a standard proxy for trade costs, on eBay and offline international trade flows. It considers the same set of 62 countries and the same basket of goods for both types of transactions, and finds the effect of distance to be on average 65 percent smaller...

The number of national export promotion agencies (EPAs) has tripled over the past two decades. While more countries have made them part of their national export strategy, studies have criticized their efficiency in developing countries (Hogan, Keesing, and Singer 1991). Partly in reaction to...

The authors have prepared this paper as a companion to the Trade and Production database, which contains trade, production, and tariff data for 67 industrial and developing countries at the industry level for 1976-99. The sector disaggregation in the database follows the International Standard...