This paper addresses the role of bilateral free trade agreements in U.S. trade policy and how their increased use has affected the multilateral trade system. It also considers the effects of bilateral trade deals on developing countries in terms of power bargaining and movement toward reciprocal...

This paper develops a dynamic theory that accounts for the evolution of trade policy, underlying internal class conflicts, and output growth performance. By analyzing political responses to the distributional effects of international trade, it finds that economies with a comparative advantage in...

This paper develops a dynamic theory that accounts for the evolution of trade policy, underlying internal class conflicts, and output growth performance over the last few centuries. By analyzing political responses to the distributional effects of international trade, it finds a prominent...

Similar to many sub-Saharan African countries, Sudan has inherited a dual economy in the immediate post-independence era where a large agriculture-based rural traditional sector coexisted with a small non-agricultural modern sector. This functional dualism remained until the first oil shipment...

What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper shows that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial organization posit that integration, while...

According to trade theory trade policy can impact quite differently (positively, negatively, nil) on economic growth depending on the model assumptions such as perfect or imperfect competition due to the existence of economies to scale or externalities. This result is replicated when the impact...

We criticize existing empirical results on the detrimental effects of natural resource dependence on the rate of economic growth after controlling for institutional quality, openness, and initial income. These results do not survive once we use instrumental variables techniques to correct for...

The paper explores the evolution of export diversification patterns along the economic development path. Using a large database with 156 countries over 19 years at the HS6 level of disaggregation (4,991 product lines) we look for action at the “intensive” and “extensive” margins...

South Korea's growth miracle has been well documented. A large set of institutional and policy reforms in the early 1960s is thought to have contributed to the country's extraordinary performance. In this paper, the authors assess the importance of one key set of policies, the trade policy...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...