Better information on how services policies vary across economies and sectors over time would improve the empirical analysis of their impact. This paper describes the Services Trade Policy Database (STPD), a joint initiative by the World Bank and the WTO Secretariat, which builds on a database...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

Competition policy, today, is an essential element of the legal and institutional framework for the global economy. Whereas decades ago, anti-competitive practices tended to be viewed mainly as a domestic phenomenon, most facets of competition law enforcement now have an important international...

Like all crises in the past, the economic downturn of 2008 - 2009 caused some frictions in the international trading system. Import tariffs, the traditional instrument for protecting domestic industries, however, have not played the primary role in this, particularly not in industrialised...

Taking global value chains (GVCs) into account has important implications for trade policy. When production is vertically fragmented and trade in intermediate inputs is prevalent, one has to look differently at a certain number of issues. Through case studies, this paper provides new evidence on...

Foreign direct investment has been important in the economic growth and global economic integration of developing countries over the last decades. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the latter, have been part of this development with increasing inflows of FDI and greater foreign...

A second approach focuses on the relationships existing between the variables themselves, using multi-criteria and graph analysis. Natural resources endowments, on the one hand, and services orientation, on the other one, are among the most determinant variables for defining Trade in Value Added...

The comparison of the key features of trade integration processes and the economic outcomes in China and India reveals that while much has already been achieved in both these economies, the Chinese reforms, especially with respect to manufacturing trade, have gone further and that this is likely...

China accelerated FDI policy reforms since the presidency of Donald Trump. We evaluate how multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond to such reforms amid rising trade policy uncertainty. Applying difference-in-differences approach on monthly bilateral FDI from 2015 to 2019, we find that reforms...