On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the WTO, this paper re-estimates the impact of WTO accession on growth. Joining the multilateral trading system not only expands access to international markets but also requires commitment to domestic reforms. Tang and Wei (2009) showed that there is...

This paper argues that liberalism helped the West escape from their long-standing rent-extracting regimes and created institutional sources of comparative advantage in trade and economic development. It does so by providing connections between three different literatures: the constitutional...

Standard parametric tests of convergence cannot capture whether the increased dispersion among state incomes is due to a steepening gradient between north and south, a few hot states randomly distributed, or as an intermediate position, the emergence of convergence clubs. This paper tests for...

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. We present a model providing a theoretical foundation to estimate empirically the effects of political borders on growth. In our model, political...

International trade in Bangladesh is extremely modest in comparison to the size of the country's population, however, it has grown rapidly in recent years. It is not highly diverse and is subject to market swings on a global scale. This study examines the economy's performance in terms of...

This paper studies the value of external commitment to policy reforms in the case of WTO/GATT accessions. The accessions often entail reforms that go beyond narrowly defined trade liberalization, and have to overcome fierce resistance in the acceding countries, as reflected in protracted...

This paper develops a fully-endogenous, variety-expansion growth model with firm-specific quality heterogeneity, limit pricing, and an endogenous distribution of markups. Trade induces only firms with high-quality products to export, whereas firms with low-quality products serve only the...

This working paper draws on historical and contemporary data on tariffs, non tariff barriers, and transportation costs (for the United States and its major trading partners) to estimate the role of policy liberalization in US merchandise trade growth over the period 1980 to 2006. Both partial...

This paper examines the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in Bangladesh. Contrary to the previous studies we use the data only for the period after the trade liberalization in the early 1990s. Both cointegration and Granger causality analysis are used to find the short-run...

The positive association between trade openness and income has been debated over years due to serious estimation flaws prevailing in the cross-country empirical trade literature. The present paper contributes to this debate by re-examining the long-run relationship between trade openness and...