The WTO’s new Agreement on Trade Facilitation (ATF) will help to reverse the region’s deceleration of overall export growth and, when implemented, could add as much as 3 percent to regional GDP and lift employment across the region by 1.2 percent. In the region’s developing economies,...

We estimate the effects of trade facilitation on the extensive margins of trade. Using OECD Trade Facilitation Indicators - which closely reflect the Trade Facilitation Agreement negotiated at the Bali WTO Ministerial Conference of December 2013 - we show that trade facilitation in a given...

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...

Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from trade facilitation—measures to reduce the overall costs of the international movement of goods. From an equity perspective an important question is how those benefits are distributed across and within...

Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...

This paper analyses the poverty impacts of an economic partnership agreement (EPA) between Uganda and the EU. As Ugandan exports are also eligible for duty-free access to the EU under the Everything But Arms scheme the main EPA-induced change will be the requirement to liberalise EU exporters'...

Economic and financial crisis in Benin since 1980s led the government to embark on a process of economic reforms in 1991. These reforms sought to remedy the fiscal and trade imbalances in order to accelerate economic growth. Trade policy reform was given priority. Import bans and quotas were...

This paper on Trade Agreements within SSA, is an assessment of the ex post bilateral trade effect of the European Union-African Caribbean Pacific Preferential Trade Agreement (EU-ACP PTA) and sub-regional regional trade agreements (RTAs) on bilateral trade involving SSA countries. The main...

Following closely the analytical approach adopted by Head and Mayer (2004) and Novy (2010), this paper derives a micro-founded bilateral trade cost measure for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a function of observable domestic and inter-national trade data. The derived measure of trade cost by Novy...

This paper adopts panel data methodologies to investigate the impact of trade liberalisation on export growth and import growth across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1981 to 2010. We find that trade liberalisation increases the growth of exports, however, imports grow faster by...