When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don't trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

When national competitiveness is invoked as a policy objective, trade experts have learned to retort that countries don't trade, firms do. This focus on the importance of the firm in international trade is consistent with the most recent developments in trade theory, but policy needs to catch...

In the context of stalled multilateral trade negotiations, major trading economies are seeking free trade agreements (FTAs) to secure their market access objectives. Nowhere is this dynamic stronger than in East Asia, where a web of bilateral and plurilateral agreements is stitching together...

This note is motivated by the contradictory conclusions reached concerning the amount of trade generated by trade agreements of varying comprehensiveness and depth when agreements are examined through different prisms: analysis of the text of agreements with a view to identifying liberalizing...

One criticism of the gravity model of international trade is that it takes no account of comparative advantage. This critique is particularly important when the gravity model is considered for policy applications such as identifying priority markets for trade promotion programs. For example, the...

Staples Theory, as developed by renowned Canadian political scientists Harold Innis and W. A. Mackintosh, sought to explain the distinctive nature of the political economy of Canada's various regions as having been shaped by the nature of the major resource exports of those regions – fish,...

Productivity agendas often struggle because they target something that is not explicitly measured – a residual in a growth accounting framework that cannot be directly addressed by policy -- an elusive unknown with an attractive name: multifactor productivity (MFP) There is no mystery about...

This paper considers the trade and trade-related policy implications of the heterogeneous firms trade literature developed in the context of “new new trade theory”. The recognition in trade theory of firm-level heterogeneity and of the complex global strategies of multinational firms has not...