Do comprehensive trade agreements increase the participation of States in global value chains (GVCs) and contribute to their development? Although there is extensive evidence in the trade literature that deep preferential trade agreements (PTAs) can increase States’ bilateral export of final...

While most economists criticise the GSP for a number of (good) reasons, all preference donors and receivers profess their commitment to what they consider as a tool for developing countries ‘to secure a share in the growth of world trade'. The political support given by both receivers and...

The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) - a system of differential and favorable trade arrangements toward less developed countries - has been around since the early 1970s. A primary objective of GSP schemes, sponsored by developed industrialized countries, especially by the United States...

Do broad, universal intellectual property rights bring the benefits of innovation, creativity, technical know-how, and foreign investment to developing countries? Or do treaties that require developing countries to grant greater intellectual property protection actually stifle development and...

In this paper, using the worldwide dataset of bilateral tariff rates, we explore how serious the omission of bilateral tariff rates in gravity is. Our findings are as follow. Firstly, the omission of bilateral tariff rates seems not to be so serious in terms of omitted-variable biases because...

Trade facilitation measures improve the trading environment by reducing transaction costs and thereby increasing the gains from trade. Although the use of trade facilitation measures for tackling trade bottlenecks has gained traction in recent times, one aspect which remains largely unexplored...

This paper examines the relative contribution of openness and the R content of trade to TFP growth for North-South trade-related technology diffusion. The measure of foreign R used in the literature on trade-related technology diffusion imposes identical contributions of openness and the R...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) have become a central topic in trade and development policy but little is known about their actual impact on economic performance because data availability has been limited. Using a new unique set of Inter- Country Input-Output tables with extensive country coverage, I...

Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...

We show that traditional gravity variables play a significant role in explaining trade flows related to global value chain participation. We find evidence that cooperation costs - measured by linguistic and geographical proximity - are more relevant for trade that reflects cross-border...