This paper calculates the decline in costs involving merchandise trade between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India during the period 1980-2008. Drawing from the recent literature, a comprehensive measure of trade costs is derived from a theory-founded gravity model of international...

This thesis addresses 3 different aspects of food and poverty related problems in developing countries. The first essay presents a new operational concept of transaction costs that firstly allows assessing the magnitude and secondly recognizing the non homogeneity of food products. This is...

The quest for large numbers has been going on for some time in international trade economics: models of trade liberalisation have consistently produced results that, compared ex post with real world data, show the right sign but the “wrong” magnitudes. This paper proposes a new approach by...