Contrary to the prevailing view that the Doha negotiations have achieved little, the authors find that on trade facilitation much progress has been made. This is particularly true in regard to action by development banks and bilateral development agencies to meet client demand for assistance in...

The authors present a new database of minimum distance road routes connecting 138 cities in 27 countries across Europe and Central Asia. They use it to show that improved road network quality is robustly associated with higher intraregional trade flows. Gravity model simulations suggest that an...

The relevance of transport costs has increased as liberalization continues to reduce artificial barriers to trade. Countries need to adopt policies to get closer to global markets. Can improvements in infrastructure and regulation reduce transport costs? Is it worthwhile to implement policies...

A concern about regional trade arrangements (RTAs) is whether the discriminatory trade barriers applied to RTAs encourage high-cost imports from member countries at the expense of nonmember lower-cost goods. RTA impact evaluations have been hampered by a lack of appropriate empirical procedures...

The authors show how relatively standard methodologies can help to measure the efficiency gains from reforming the organization of port infrastructure, how those measures can be used to promote competition between ports, and how competition can be built into an incentive-driven regulatory...

The authors determine how time delays affect international trade using newly collected World Bank data on the days it takes to move standard cargo from the factory gate to the ship in 126 countries. They estimate a modified gravity equation, controlling for endogeneity and remoteness. On...

The authors develop a framework for studying trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated products. In their model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good and make a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution...

The world economic crisis of 2008 presents clear challenges to prospects for economic growth in developing countries. This is particularly true for emerging economies in East Asia that have relied to a great extent over the past decade on export-led growth. What steps to facilitate trade promise...

This paper examines the effects of transit, documentation, and ports and customs delays on Africa’s exports. The authors find that transit delays have the most economically and statically significant effect on exports. A one-day reduction in inland travel times leads to a 7 percent increase in...

Over the past decade network industries (such as gas, electricity, and telecommunications) have undergone a dramatic transformation. Competition has been introduced in industries that had long been viewed as textbook examples of natural monopolies. Production and transport have been unbundled to...