Extensive research has demonstrated the existence of large potential welfare gains from trade facilitation - measures to reduce the overall costs of the international movement of goods. From an equity perspective an important question is how those benefits are distributed across and within...

This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

We demonstrate that durable MFN tariff elimination affects trade patterns through several layers, and magnitudes of effects are sizable. The WTO Information Technology Agreement's (ITA) unique setting allows us to overcome the challenges associated with identifying effects of non-discriminatory...

Strong opinions about the impact of globalization on poverty are not always backed by robust factual evidence. As argued in this paper, however, it is not all that easy to lay our hands on robust facts. Quantitative analyses of trade liberalization appear highly sensitive to basic modelling and...

Deepening industrial interdependency in East Asia was not just a spontaneous phenomenon but it has been carefully aided and facilitated by the series of policies implemented by national governments. We examine here the link between trade facilitation policies and the evolution of production...

The European Union (EU) supports developing countries with a unilateral trade preference scheme. The scheme underwent a major reform in 2014, in which many countries lost access to reduced tariff rates. We analyse how this radical step that removed preferences from 103 countries by 2018 fits...

Trade liberalization has proceeded on the assumption that eventual aggregate welfare gains will exceed the losses. While compensatory mechanisms exist in most countries, they tend to be underfunded and ineffective. To begin to address this problem, the direct beneficiaries from trade...

This paper reviews the role of services in development and growth, the potential role of trade in services as a driver of the productivity performance of sectors that use services as inputs, and the links between services policies and domestic trade costs. Barriers to trade in services have...

Two issues stand out in this conversation. The first concerns the unfinished business of the global fight against the scourge of poverty, which impacts one region more than most: Africa. At the same time, a key pre-requisite for economic performance - affordable and efficient public...