The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is the flagship of U.S. commercial and development policy with Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper looks at the impact of the trade preferences that are the central element of AGOA on African countries'exports to the U.S. and puts them in the perspective...

Global commodity markets are affected by a variety of government policies that may expand or lower overall supply and as a result affect world prices for the specific products concerned. Market failures and market structures (market power along the value chain) also affect supply. This paper...

This paper examines the impact of two crises on the global apparel value chain: the World Trade Organization phase-out of the quota system for textiles and apparel in 2005, which provided access for many poor and small export-oriented economies to the markets of industrialized countries, and the...

The authors examine an issue at the nexus of domestic competition policy and international trade, the interaction between goods trade and market power in domestic trade and distribution sectors. Theory suggests a set of linkages between service-sector competition and goods trade supported by...

In a large cross-country sample of manufacturing establishments drawn from 188 cities, average exports per establishment are smaller for African firms than for businesses in other regions. The authors show that this is mainly because, on average, African firms face more adverse economic...

While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive...

How does the process of export diversification play out in a transitioning economy, especially in light of government policy aimed at trade liberalization? This paper examines this question by considering a directed policy effort by Syria -- an economy transitioning from both economic...

Bosnia and Herzegovina's industrial restructuring, as seen through the lenses of foreign trade performance and its sustainability, has taken off. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s exports have displayed strong dynamics outstripping the pace of growth of exports in almost each year over 1997-2007...

This paper looks at Bulgaria's industrial restructuring through the lenses of its evolving specialization in international division oflabor and integration into international markets with a special emphasis on EU markets. Its major findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Developments in...

In recent debates, trade preference erosion has been viewed by some as damaging to developing countries, and by others as insignificant, except in a few cases. But little data have been available to back either view. The objective of this paper is to improve our measures of the size,...