This book provides a broad and in-depth introduction to the geopolitical, economic and trade changes wrought with the increasing influence of the countries of the Global South in international affairs. The global role of the developing countries came to the forefront in 1974, when the United...

We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers. We first document that nearly half of the variation can be explained by a parsimonious set of physical geography attributes. A full set of country...

This paper documents patterns in international trade costs in processed foods for a large cross-section of developing and developed countries, during the 1976-2000 period. A trade costs index is inferred from a micro-founded gravity equation that incorporates bilateral 'iceberg' trade costs. For...