Using a cross-section of more than 38,000 manufacturing and 24,000 services firms in 105 low- and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this chapter assesses whether there are productivity spillovers from services to manufacturing firms located in the same subnational...

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 paper studies the relationship between global value chain (GVC) participation, worker-level routine task intensity, and wage inequality within countries. Using unique survey data from 38 countries, we find that higher GVC participation is associated with more routine-intensive work,...

Two seemingly unconnected empirical results suggest an intriguing mechanism. First, economic integration helps harmonize prices internationally, with trade being the primary channel (Rogoff 1996, Goldberg and Knetter 1997). Second, monetary union may greatly increase the amount of trade among...

This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of EMU on trade, adding two new elements. First, we propose a theoretical model for explaining how the euro could have increased trade by the large amounts found in the empirical literature. Second, we propose a sectoral dataset to test the...

What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...

The unprecedented drop in international trade during the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 has mainly been analysed at the macroeconomic or sectoral level. However, exporters who are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, size or external financial dependence should be...

Global trade contracted quickly and severely during the global crisis. This paper, using a unique dataset of French firms, matching together export data with firm-level credit constraints, shows that most of the 2008-2009 trade collapse is accounted by the unprecedented demand shock and by...

Trade is measured on a gross sales basis while GDP is measured on a net sales basis, i.e. value added. The rapid internationalisation of production in the last two decades has meant that gross trade flows are increasingly unrepresentative of value added flows. This fact has important...

The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade....