More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) have become a central topic in trade and development policy but little is known about their actual impact on economic performance because data availability has been limited. Using a new unique set of Inter- Country Input-Output tables with extensive country coverage, I...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral 'iceberg' trade costs. For...

Notwithstanding some progress in market and product diversification - including services - LDCs remain particularly vulnerable to external shocks. With the exception of 2006-2008, the LDCs as a group have systematically recorded a trade deficit. The 2008-2009 global crisis and the bumpy recovery...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

This book looks at four main questions relevant to the discussion of implementation and effectiveness of aid for trade. • How severe are the various possible constraints to trade expansion? • How different are the constraints to imports from the constraints to exports? • What impact would...