Despite widespread anecdotal evidence that lower trade barriers increase international trade, there is little firm quantitative evidence of the ‘trade-cost elasticity’ of trade flows, one of the two key aggregate statistics that have recently been identified as sufficient to quantify the...

I develop an index for economic integration accounting for its gradual and bilateral nature: the Gradual And Bilateral Integration (GABI) index. The graduality captures differences in the depth and path of five stages in economic integration and is an improvement over the use of binary dummy...