More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

This paper addresses the regulatory and policy environments conducive for e-commerce to thrive. In particular, as regulatory issues affecting e-commerce have become more prominent in recent regional trade agreements (RTAs), the paper seeks to investigate their role in setting the regulatory...

This paper traces the rise of export-led growth as a development paradigm and argues that it is exhausted owing to changed conditions in emerging market (EM) and developed economies. The global economy needs a recalibration that facilitates a new paradigm of domestic demand-led growth....

On September 1, 2010, the Central Bank of Ethiopia announced a devaluation of the birr by 20%. With this devaluation measure, the value of the birr has declined by at least 45% since 2008. It is to be recalled that the birr was devalued by at least 10% in October 2008, by 9.9% in July 2009, and...

This paper proposes a unique overview of trade policies trends since the launch of the Doha Round, based on detailed data on tariffs and trade covering 130 countries. We show that regionalism has delivered limited effective liberalization so far, leading to only a 0.3 percentage point (p.p.) cut...

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

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...

Developing country delegates in multilateral trade negotiations have become quite active in forming bargaining coalitions. But there has been little research concerning how this has been done, what the results have been, or what influences these results.1 In tackling these questions, this paper...

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...