The Information Technology Agreement (ITA), a pluri-lateral trade agreement, seeks to accelerate and deepen the reduction of trade barriers for the critically important information and communication technology (ICT) industry. ITA thus provides an interesting case study of how tariff reduction...

This paper examines how firms in an emerging economy are affected by violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005–2010, and using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in...

There has been much concern about Africa's recent export performance. Africa's share of world exports has declined and most countries are highly dependent upon a narrow range of primary commodities for export earnings. This article looks at factors that affect the export performance of...

Since 1983, Ghana has witnessed trade liberalization policies that were introduced as part of structural adjustment and economic recovery programmes and meant to open up the once closed economy. As part of such reforms, tariffs were reduced, and non-tariff trade barriers lessened. The adjustment...

This study empirically investigates to ascertain the impact of trade protection vis-à-vis border closure policy on manufacturing sector in Nigeria between January 2018 and June 2021 using monthly secondary data. The study employs traditional theory of protectionism as its theoretical framework....

In this study, a new sample of 38 manufacturing firms from Cameroon is examined for the period 1980-95. A production function and an export function are estimated in order to study the determinants of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and export performance. The results demonstrate a mutually...

We examine whether offshoring firms outperform purely domestic firms – in terms of efficiency, innovativeness and skill composition – in the peculiar context of Italy, the G7 country with the largest shadow-economy share. We posit that manufacturing firms – to counter emerging economies'...

This paper examines the effects of regional clustering on firm exporting performance taking into account differences in firm productivity as well as firm's attempts to enhance productivity via innovation investments. A structural framework is employed using a set of recursive equations that is...

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing integration of developing countries into global value chains (GVCs). This growing participation in global production sharing has raised hopes for economic upgrading within such value chains. However, globalization has intensified international...

This paper examines the impact of trade and fiscal reforms and of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc on enterprise development in Chad and Gabon. These reforms provide a natural experiment to assess the impact of trade liberalisation in countries with a small and backward manufacturing...