The staff report on Euro Area Policies highlights cyclical growth developments and risks. The area’s real GDP growth has picked up, responding to strong foreign demand and relaxed financial conditions. The final domestic demand growth remains subdued, and the area lags global growth by a...

Regional trade arrangements (RTAs) in Africa have been ineffective in promoting trade and foreign direct investment. Relatively high external trade barriers and low resource complementarity between member countries limit both intra- and extraregional trade. Small market size, poor transport...

This paper investigates how trade flows are being affected by new discriminatory measures implemented during the global financial crisis. We match data on behind-the-border measures (e.g., bailouts and subsidies) and border measures implemented through April 2010 to monthly HS 4-digit bilateral...

This paper provides a review of the literature on competitiveness and leakage concerns associated with differentiated climate abatement commitments among countries. The literature reviewed is not exhausted, but it is sufficient to provide a balanced view of both academics and policy circles....

GINFORS (Global INterindustry FORecasting System) represents a state–of–the–art tool for integrated quantitative policy assessments of long run economic developments and associated pressures on the environment. Its empirical modelling framework rests on national input–output accounts...

International trade policy analysis has tended to focus on the production side of general equilibrium, with policies such as a tariff or carbon tax affecting international and internal income distributions through a Heckscher-Ohlin nexus of factor intensities and factor endowments. Here I move...

This paper derives a new effect of trade liberalisation on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced not only by the long-established scale effect, but also by a reallocation effect resulting from an...

At the Davos forum of January 2014, a group of 14 countries pledged to launch negotiations on liberalising trade in ‘green goods’ (also known as`environmental goods’(EGs)), focussing on the elimination of tariffs for an ‘APEC list’ of 54 products. The paper shows that the ‘Davos...

The Marco Polo programme of the European Commission aims to shift or avoid freight transport off the roads to other more environmentally friendly transport modes. The programme is implemented through yearly calls for proposals. The proposals received to each call are selected for financial...

This paper contributes to the issue of the uneven distribution of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects among developing countries. By applying a gravity model to a panel dataset at bilateral country level, we find that well-established export flows from developed economies towards...