Dick Sabot, an active member of CGD's founding Board of Directors, was finishing this paper when he died suddenly on July 6 of 2005. The paper highlights the risks to developing countries posed by the growing U.S. external deficit and describes three possible scenarios. In the first, the US...

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...

Aid for Trade supports developing and least-developed countries in building their trade capacity and in increasing their exports by turning market access opportunities into market presence. It does so by addressing four key areas: trade policy & regulations; economic infrastructure; building...

This paper looks at the various trade policies WTO Members have put into place to foster women's economic empowerment. The analysis below is based on the information provided by WTO Members as part of their Trade Policy Review (TPRs) process from 2014 to 2018. Reports from the WTO Secretariat,...

In September 2015, Heads of State and Government will gather in New York to agree the post-2015 development agenda. The role that trade will play in this agenda is neither clear, nor agreed. Yet an open, non-discriminatory, rules-based multilateral trading system underpins sustainable...

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...

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...

The World Trade Organization's (WTO) most recent Ministerial Conference took place last December in Nairobi, Kenya. Opinions vary on how much was achieved, and, perhaps more importantly, where the WTO goes from here. The United States and the European Union have emphasized that “new” issues...

We developed Dynamic Inter Regional Computable General Equilibrium (IR- CGE) for Energy and Agriculture Model that incorporates geographic features into CGE. Within the context of comparative advantage we demonstrate how the biofuel policy impact on trade and food security. We find that biofuel...

All WTO members participate in the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), a rules-based bottom-up approach built on monitorable provisions (e.g. the publication of information, advance rulings, appeal or review of decisions, transparency, and border agency cooperation) aimed at reducing time in...